These days, more and more people are experiencing financial stress due to the worldwide pandemic caused by COVID-19. Still, even before the pandemic began, reports showed that about 32% of employees have financial problems that largely affect their lives. These economic concerns that your employees carry can impact your business as a whole.

Personal debt, rising health care costs, unexpected expenses, and many other financial problems are causing individuals to experience increased stress levels. This negatively impacts their job performance as well as their physical, mental, and emotional health. A business’s success will highly depend on the performance and productivity of its employees. That is why helping your employees overcome financial stress can be beneficial to employers as well.

Organize seminars

Encouraging your workers to attend financial seminars can help them better understand their financial responsibilities, goals, and objectives to manage their finances more effectively. Employees can also discover effective practices that can allow them to handle their money efficiently.

Establish financial programs

For the benefit of your employees, having an Employee Assistance Program or EAP for your health insurance plans can help your employees overcome health care issues and provide advice on budgeting, handling debt, planning for retirement, and so much more. Having an EAP can also lessen absenteeism, accidents, grievances, compensation claims, employee turnover costs, and health care costs while attending to security issues and employee productivity.

Employee Purchasing Programs (EPP) can also help employees avoid high-interest rate charges when faced with unexpected expenses. With the help of EPPs, employees can pay for their purchases through paycheck deductions or monthly bank drafts with the convenience of having no hidden fees, interest charges, or credit checks.

Financial programs that can help your employees manage debt can also take some of the weight off of their shoulders. Through these programs, employees will find the best rates for refinancing debt or have the assistance to set up savings plans. Whether it be one-on-one assistance or online resources, your employees will surely appreciate the effort you are making to manage their finances. Moreover, this can increase employee productivity, satisfaction, and loyalty in the long run.

Help your employees save up for retirement

Retirement planning can be a stressful task for employees to do alone. As an employer, it is your duty to put in as much work when figuring out the best retirement plan for your employees.

Offering a 401(k) plan for your employees can also provide extensive educational tools and resources to assist your employees in any financial challenge. Through this, employees can allow a percentage of their paychecks to go directly to an account that can store funds for their retirements. Employee contributions essentially fund 401 (k) plans through pre-tax paycheck deductions.

Furthermore, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) are tax-favored investment accounts that your employee can use to invest in stocks, ETFs, bonds, and other types of investments. Either traditional or Roth IRAs, retirement plans will more likely depend on your employees’ circumstances.

Provide professional assistance

Providing financial benefits for employees might not be enough. It is best to allow them to consult financial advisors to help them sort out any economic challenges. Having a professional onboard can help your employees easily figure out what the best step to take is. As a result, this can vastly reduce the stress levels that they may be experiencing when dealing with financial matters like budgeting or saving, fixing bad credit, managing medical bills, and planning for retirement.

Communicate and monitor employees’ well-being

It is essential to explicitly let your employees know about relief resources being provided by the company. Building an environment that allows your employees to be open and comfortable about their financial challenges should be prioritized. Through this, you can point out who needs help and how you can help them.

You can also re-evaluate employee pay and benefits to ensure that your workers are getting a sufficient amount of salary on par with the amount of workload they currently have. It is best to encourage workers to discuss their current circumstances and concerns to reduce the stress and anxiety that they might be experiencing.

Ultimately, helping employees with their financial challenges can be a great way to improve your workforce’s financial well-being. As an employer, one of your responsibilities is to check on your employees and help them with anything that might affect their work performance. Relieving your employees’ financial stress can motivate them to be more productive and stay loyal for a long time.