What It’s Worth: The Value of Employee Financial Wellness

By GreenPath Financial Wellness

Let’s say your payroll manager just missed her student loan payment for the second time or your head of facilities constantly racks up credit card charges to pay for his son’s competitive travel soccer team. Maybe your operations director spends every spare moment searching for college scholarships for her two kids or your best HR recruiter is anxiety-ridden trying to figure out how to pay for his mother’s nursing home care.

Why should any of this concern you as an employer? Because your employees’ financial health affects their mental, physical and behavioral health, and that affects everything from productivity to absenteeism to retention to recruitment. Consider this:

According to the PwC employee financial wellness survey, one in three employees have been distracted at work by personal finance issues within the past year.

Nearly half of those distracted by finances spend three or more hours a week dealing with personal finance issues at work.

Forty-three percent of employees plan to delay retirement due to financial concerns.

Another study on financial stress and the workplace found employees who are financially stressed have lower job satisfaction, which negatively impacts turnover.

It’s not just employees on the lower end of the pay scale who are stressed. In a 2016 CareerBuilder survey, 68 percent of workers said they were in debt, and workers of all income levels report living paycheck to paycheck – even 9 percent of those making $100,000 or more.

Your employees’ financial wellness is a key component of their overall wellness.

There is something you can do about it.

Asset Health has partnered with GreenPath Financial Wellness, a leading national nonprofit financial counseling and education organization, to develop a new financial wellness platform you can offer to your employees.

GreenPath has been empowering people to live financially healthy lives since 1961. We know that when people are more financially confident, they are more prepared to handle life’s curveballs.

We use human-centered design principles to create and test products and services that meet people’s financial health needs. We also partner with other companies, like Asset Health, to make these products and services available and accessible to people who need them.

GreenPath and Asset Health have been working together for nearly two years to develop and test a new, personalized, adaptive financial wellness platform for employees. The product uses a whole-person perspective and seamlessly adds to the Asset Health platform to address the physical, emotional, behavioral and financial components of wellness.

Like physical health programs, employees who use the financial health program will first take an assessment. Each employee will receive personalized feedback, exercises and guidance based on their results.

It’s interactive, too. Using principles of behavioral science, users receive reminders, earn badges for reaching goals, and gain access to other motivational tools that help to positively change behavior. And, users can get personalized coaching from GreenPath certified credit counselors.

The financial health of your employees matters. Their health impacts your company’s bottom line.

When your team is financially healthy, they are less stressed, more productive and more content. This not only leads to a better workplace, it also helps them become empowered to achieve their dreams.