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Ways to ease employees’ financial fears and anxiety
Financial wellbeing can have serious implications for overall happiness and holistic health.
Increased inflation and the cost of living has resulted in many workers in the UK relying on loans to make ends meet. These mounting financial pressures can lead to spiralling anxiety, even for people who are comparatively comfortable financially.
Financial problems can affect mental health; mental health can also affect people’s finances. When people go through periods of poor mental wellbeing, 72% say their finances suffer. When trying to manage their mental health, they may spend more, put off dealing with creditors, and even take out loans they otherwise wouldn’t.
Effect on work performance
Financial worries and their impact on mental wellbeing also have spillover effects on employee performance and personal relationships. While programmes that help to increase financial literacy and strategies to manage and meet monetary goals can help, they typically address only one aspect of a complex issue.
How we handle finances, like how we handle all of life’s key elements, is deeply emotional and psychological.
Fortunately, building resilience and coping skills and supporting mental wellbeing has a positive impact across all aspects of life, including finances. With that in mind, here are 3 ways employers can help employees handle financial worries during tough times.
1. Let employees address stress on their own terms
Stigma around financial health is even stronger than stigma around mental health. Many are, therefore, unwilling to seek the support they need if it means facing other people, ie getting in-person care.
But while financial anxiety is a specific problem, it can be remedied with broader-based approaches to reducing worry and building resilience, especially if those solutions give individuals the opportunity to address stress on their own terms. By providing employees with self-serve access to practical tools, you enable them to take action to help themselves before their financial worries and stress escalate.
This means that solutions and offerings need to be easily accessible to your entire employee population, leading to a proactive response rather than a reactive one. Easy-to-access offerings on managing financial worry and supporting mental wellbeing more generally enable employees (and employers) to act preventatively rather than reactively.
2. Mobile access means anywhere
Today’s workforce is mobile and not just in the sense that they live and work across the world – their phones are a tool central to their ways of working and living and any resources you offer must take this into account.
With the many obligations professionals juggle in their work and personal lives, having to physically travel somewhere to deal with incoming feelings of anxiety or stress can feel like another to-do, balancing on top of the endless pile of pre-existing tasks.
Mobile-first support helps resolve this issue – particularly if it’s 24/7 and on-demand. As research from McKinsey shows, workers across age groups, employment sectors and physical locations are open to digital care solutions.
3. Safety first
When people feel psychologically safe at work, it reduces the barriers to asking for the help they need and use employer-provided tools and resources to support any struggles they may be experiencing. This is particularly important for marginalised populations as they’ve been shown to experience increased obstacles in access to care and greater vulnerability to economic uncertainty.
To build a safe space, you’ll need to openly communicate and not just about the resources available and how best to access them. While every workplace is different, there are three key messages you’ll need to drive home that are crucial to creating psychological safety in any population. 1) It’s okay not to be okay. 2) We want to help because we care. And 3) These are the resources available to help.
Find out more about how to improve access to mental health support with our free report, Helping Employees Overcome Barriers to Mental Wellbeing.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Koa Health
At Koa Health, we believe digital mental health solutions are the answer to mental health issues.
