By: Heather R. Huhman, Contributor
Counting down to payday is a stressful, but all too common practice. Unfortunately, an August 2017 CareerBuilder survey found that the vast majority (78 percent) of the 3,462 full-time U.S. workers polled said they live paycheck to paycheck.
This isn’t just the employees’ problem. Financial stress hurts everything from productivity and performance to morale and satisfaction at work, making it an employers’ problem, too.
For these reasons, more employers are opting to provide financial wellness assistance to their employees.
Free financial education
To improve where they stand financially, employees need to first focus on becoming more financially literate. Interestingly, employees at BambooHR, an HR software company based in Lindon, Utah, actually get paid to complete a class on financial savviness.
The course, called “Financial Peace,” has not only helped them gain a better understanding of their finances, employees say, but also given them peace of mind. “It just clicked for me,” Kelsie Davis, a BambooHR employee, says in a company YouTube video. “The small sacrifices now have big payoffs later.”
Since taking the class, graduates have been able to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and also begin saving more, the company reports.
To give your own employees the same sense of financial knowledge and peace, offer access to financial literacy tools and programs that walk employees through the basics of budgeting, reducing debt and saving.