If you would like a more robust workforce that helps the success of your business, it may be time to consider ways that you as the business owner can help better support your employees. A healthier workforce means that you will see a greater quality of work as well as an increase in employee retention.
Overall, it is crucial that you are investing in the wellness of your staff which doesn’t just include supporting their physical and emotional health. You can sometimes overlook an important component which is your employees’ financial wellness.
When it comes to their wellness, your goal should be to help address the stress or negative feelings that a staff member may have towards money.
You might be wondering what you can do to help staff feel more confident about their finances. The first step is offering them services and resources that they can turn to if they need assistance.
Anyone can easily struggle with managing bills, keeping track of payments, as well as planning financially for an unknown future. By providing them with a resource, you are helping put your employees’ minds at ease as well as reducing the stressful aspects of finances. You will even be able to assist them to have a more positive attitude towards money and be more educated about the best financial practices they should be using.
The resource you choose can either be an actual person, a website, or an application that provides financial advice. As you are searching for the best resource to use for your staff, keep in mind that whatever tool you use should provide your staff with access to a real person.
According to Grant Gallager in the podcast, Small Biz Ahead, it is great for businesses to provide an app or some sort of on-demand technology to help staff with their finances, but it can be difficult to earn an employee’s trust through those. It is important that individuals feel like their financial situation is understood and technology won’t understand complex situations, which is why having a live person to speak with can be beneficial. That way the advisor can earn the employee’s trust and offer the best recommendations.
You may want to work with an institution that provides strong customer service and has employees passionate about educating others. This resource should be able to assist staff with setting financial goals, budgeting, and offering additional services.
For example, many credit unions provide free credit counseling to their members through various agencies. This means that if an employee is not happy with their current credit score, they will be able to get advice on how to get their score back on track. They will even be provided a timeline on how long it will potentially take for them to reach their goal.
If an employee wants to increase their financial wellbeing, Gallagher recommends that they focus on automation to save time as they will no longer have to write out a check or manually make a payment each month. Another tip he provides is to look at all accounts at least on a monthly basis to make sure that nothing suspicious is going on and that everything is operating as it should.
Most individuals will also be interested in working towards an important savings goal. The simplest way for staff to save towards their target is to set up automatic transfers. These could be weekly or monthly transfers from one account to go to a specific savings.
By putting this on autopilot, they will be able to easily achieve their goal since they won’t have to manually move funds. As they start to think about their goals, it is important that they create a one year, five year, and ten year goal. By setting multiple timelines, this helps staff to not get overwhelmed with their big end goal as they will have smaller goals to work towards which will help them to feel more accomplished.
As a business owner, it is important not to take a back seat when it comes to your employees’ wellness. It is standard for businesses to focus on supporting the emotional and physical health of staff, but financial wellness is also crucial if you want to see your staff succeed.
