In this edition of HR Insights, Nicole Keltgen discusses the connection of employee productivity with their financial wellness.
Professional life and personal life are two separate domains, but what happens in one can strongly affect the other. For example, stress in someone’s personal life can have a negative influence on his or her work life. This is especially true for financial-related stress: one study found that “employees who are stressed about their finances are nearly five times more likely to be distracted by their finances at work, twice as likely to spend three hours or more at work dealing with financial matters, and three times more likely to spend five hours or more.”
Because debt is one of the major stressors in people’s lives today, many organizations are recognizing the impact of personal debt on their employees’ professional lives-and, in turn, the companies’ bottom lines-and establishing financial wellness programs for their workers. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, more and more employers are offering some type of financial advice or resources to their employees. In 2016, for example, “24% of organizations offered employees online financial/investment advice, 27% offered on-on-one advice [and] 22% offered group or classroom financial advice.”
