What could financial mindfulness unlock for your organisation?

As we at Neyber listen to HR professionals around the country, we’re learning that you care profoundly about your organisation’s employees and help them in a number of ways. Yet many organisations are missing a trick by not helping employees better look after their financial health too.

Money worries

You want your people to be physically and mentally well and ready to perform at their optimum to achieve their potential. Naturally, business performance drives this; and we know that being aware of the whole employee makes a tangible difference to engagement scores, productivity and service delivery.

From get fit initiatives such as the 10,000 steps Global Corporate Challenge to offering workplace gym membership, organisations everywhere are taking wellbeing seriously. So we’ve started to ask the HR professionals we meet whether they’ve factored into their benefits mix what we’re calling 'financial mindfulness'.

We ask, because our research shows that employees across UK plc are facing incredible levels of financial stress. In practice this means that 23% of employees have lost sleep due to money worries over the past year.

Borrowing when you’re on a low to middle income is distracting. Beyond the paper work and pleading with the bank adviser, or worse still the fast click with online lenders who transform from colourful advertisers into something altogether different if you miss a payment, your employee can find getting access to money to pay for a holiday or a road-worthy vehicle difficult, time consuming and worrying.

And, if your employees borrow badly, they’ll be on the receiving end of continuous calls from lenders’ call centres and subject to interest rates that escalate wildly.

Or if your employees are savers, they will have the annoyance of being subject to low interest rates making it tough to save to any effect despite working really hard to build their nest egg.

So financial mindfulness is where an employer shows awareness of the effect borrowing and low interest rates can have on employee wellbeing, and acts to relieve this distraction to their organisation’s success.

We also know that many employers are aware of this as they already offer access to financial benefits through their benefits programme, such as mortgage or wills advice.

At Neyber we propose taking this benefit a step further by offering the chance for your employees to borrow and save together in their workplace at vastly better rates of interest than are currently available from the high street banks. This is a benefit that is entirely free for participating employers with the added benefits of payments being administered through existing payroll systems.

So why are we suggesting that as an HR professional you could benefit from thinking in terms of financial mindfulness? The best definition we’ve found of mindfulness in the workplace comes from Janice Marturano, quoted in the Financial Times. The General Mills’ deputy general counsel defines mindfulness as training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to have spaciousness for creativity and to feel connected.

Mindfulness as a workplace concept has taken a rap recently, with the Harvard Business Review seeing it at first as a golden bullet for results, and more recently as a distraction. Our definition of financial mindfulness has nothing to do with meditation or yoga for employees.

We believe that financial mindfulness is about freeing your employees from the worry and stress of borrowing and saving so they can concentrate on their work and, through Neyber’s unique financial solution, be connected to your organisation in a new way.

We are already engaged with police officers nationwide across 43 forces and we are proud that they trust us with their employees’ financial wellbeing. We believe that applying financial mindfulness as an employee benefit concept can unlock better performance, higher levels of engagement and productivity.

Financial mindfulness in the workplace lifts a continuous source of anxiety to allow your employees to borrow and save together at vastly better rates of interest, allowing them to be more connected to their employer and to concentrate on their organisation’s success.

If your planning process is calling on you to approach employee benefits in new and innovative ways, Financial mindfulness and removing the strain of money management could be a way forward.

This article was provided by Neyber.