If you want to attract the best employees and retain your top performers, it is essential to ensure that you help them achieve long-term financial stability. Here we look at some easy steps you can take to strengthen your workers’ financial future, which can in turn help you gain happier, more motivated employees and subsequently boost your business’s productivity.
Simply put, five key steps you can take to ensure your employees’ long-term financial stability are to:
- Promote financial education
- Offer competitive compensation packages
- Support employee savings
- Provide accessible benefits
- Foster a culture of financial wellbeing.
So, let’s take a more in-depth look at these.
1. Promote financial education
Ensuring that your employees are financially educated is a great place to start when looking to boost their long-term financial stability. It is also of vital importance, as research shows that only 33% of people globally are financially literate. Empowering your employees to get up to speed with their financial know-how can also help improve their overall wellbeing, enabling them to avoid demoralising issues such as problem debt. This can not only benefit them, but also your business, as it’s no great secret that happier people make more productive workers, which recent research confirms.
But, how can you achieve this? Well, you could:
- Create helpful resources, such as online videos, articles and interactive tools, to make financial information easily available
- Offer workshops on topics such as investing, debt management and saving, by partnering with financial experts
- Facilitate individual coaching sessions, to supply personalised advice and address concerns
- Provide a user-friendly fiinancial wellbeing platform, where employees can directly access all the guidance needed, at their fingertips.
2. Offer competitive compensation packages
Providing fair and competitive salaries to your employees is a must, if you want to ensure your employees’ long-term financial stability. In the current economic climate, this is especially important, as according to the Employee Financial Wellbeing Study, only 43% of men and 30% of women think their salary is keeping up with their cost of living. This can also help you attract the right people and keep your top performers on-board, helping to ensure your company’s long-term financial stability as well. After all, you don’t want to go through the costly process of recruiting and training, just for your star workers to jump ship for better compensation packages elsewhere. You therefore need to regularly review and benchmark the salaries you offer, to stay competitive. This means that your base salaries should align with industry standards and reflect the skills and experience of your employees.
Putting a competitive compensation package in place will not only enable your workers to cover their everyday expenses, but also ensure they can save and plan a more secure financial future. However, a competitive compensation package consists of more than just wages. To offer a truly competitive package, you could also consider providing:
- Bonuses and incentives related to performance and contributions to your company’s success
- A wide-ranging benefits package, including good paid holiday and sick leave
- Employee discounts and rewards, which could be offered via an employee benefits platform
- Flexible and remote working, to support a healthy work–life balance.
3. Support employee savings
A vital step to take if you are serious about ensuring your employees’ long-term financial stability, is to fully encourage them to save, in particular for retirement. There are many reasons why you should help your employees to save, but the bottom line is that saving can help your workers to feel more secure about their financial future, as if they are stressed about their finances, it not only impacts their wellbeing, but can seriously affect your company’s success too. Research shows that employees who are stressed about money are twice as likely to be searching for a new job, 10 times more likely to be less productive at work and 11 times more likely to be having sleepless nights. This all adds up to problems for your employees and your business.
However, you can easily tackle this issue by providing a good pension package, facilitated by automatic payroll deductions and enhanced with employer-matching contributions. For example, you could consider instigating a Salary Sacrifice Pension scheme, which would enable your employees to save for retirement in a more tax-efficient way.
Making it easier for your employees to take control and manage their savings, will also help them to achieve a stronger financial future and reduce stress. This can be achieved by providing an online platform that supplies a dashboard where they can manage their pensions all in one convenient place, and access tools to help them track their financial progress.
4. Provide additional accessible benefits
In addition to providing a competitive salary and good retirement plan, offering other supportive benefits to your employees is also a vital step to ensure their long-term financial stability and overall wellbeing. Indeed, you can strengthen the future financial security of your workers with a whole range of invaluable, practical benefits. These could include:
- Life insurance: This is much more than a ‘nice-to-have’ benefit, as life insurance can provide indispensable financial protection for your workers and their families in tough times, if unexpected life events occur. It also offers reassurance to your workers that if the worst should happen to them, their loved ones will be looked after.
- Healthcare coverage: Now, more than ever, in these post-pandemic, cost-of-living times, healthcare insurance is a valuable benefit to offer. This provides your employees with access to affordable private healthcare, to help them get the medical care they need, when they need it, and protect them from prohibitive expenses.
- An employee assistance programme: This increasingly popular employee benefit can provide support and counselling for various personal and financial issues. In this way, you can help your staff overcome difficulties that could be affecting their physical and mental wellbeing, as well as their work performance.
Once introduced, it is also important to ensure that such valuable benefits are made easily available to your employees, which can be achieved via a financial wellbeing platform.
5. Cultivate a culture of financial wellbeing
In general, people can find it difficult to discuss financial issues, so it is important to cultivate a positive company culture of financial wellbeing, to de-stigmatise the subject and create a supportive environment. This can contribute to better wellbeing for your workers and greater financial stability, as well as helping them to be more productive in the workplace. So, it not only benefits your employees, but can directly aid efficiency in your business.
This can be achieved by:
- Encouraging open dialogue about financial issues, especially any struggles your employees may be encountering
- Providing support and resources to help any of your employees who are experiencing financial hardship
- Offering financial workshops and education programmes, which can help prevent the causes of issues, such as sessions on budgeting, debt management and savings strategies
- Supply access to tools that can help employees easily manage their finances, such as a straightforward financial wellbeing platform.
A win-win strategy
Ultimately, taking these steps to ensure the long-term financial stability of your employees is a win-win strategy for your workers and your business. Not only does it help your people prevent, or overcome, serious financial issues, but it can help improve their motivation and productivity to boost the success of your business as a whole.