It can be too easy to overlook the importance of your employees wielding financial expertise. After all, finance experts and professionals are already close at hand for workers needing their advice. However, financially educating your workers isn’t about effectively turning them into accountants.
Instead, it’s about helping your staff to relieve personal financial pressures that could be weighing down on their mental wellbeing and, consequently, their workplace performance. Therefore, you have an interest in proactively helping to bring the right educational opportunities to their notice.
Treat financial education as an employee perk
You might habitually gift your employees with nights eating out and ping pong tables – but, glamorous though these bonuses might initially seem, there can remain a large question mark over the value that they truly deliver in the long term.
While financial education could come across as too “boring” to count as a perk in the same way, you should remind your staff that lessons learnt from it can stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Offer tools that your workers are likely to use
While there abound many different tools aimed at helping people to track their financial situations, different demographics can be inclined to choose different tools.
In one survey cited by Entrepreneur, though tools for tracking spending and saving are widely favoured, respondents aged under 40 primarily prefer online portals or mobile apps, while respondents past the 40 mark would choose a financial advisor over online resources.
Fortunately, a corporate wellness company like LifeWorks can provide a wide range of financial learning solutions, from instructor-led workshops right through to real-time virtual classrooms.
Don’t allow support to become too intrusive
Research suggests that, while your workers would appreciate you helping them to help themselves when it comes to financial literacy, you should also be careful not to infringe their privacy.
Therefore, while your attempts to advertise means of improving financial literacy may be welcomed, attempting to advise people on specific financial situations in their lives could be deemed excessive.
Help workers to put financial knowhow into action
While opening up opportunities for financial education would be a wise move, you can’t expect it to reap meaningful results unless the knowledge and skills learnt by your workers is put into action.
Hence, as your personnel grow more confident in their financial decision-making, you could provide additional support aimed at assisting them in meeting specific goals, like achieving positive cash flow and generating savings in both the short and long term.
Focus on stopping the downward spiral of financial anxiety
When financial problems are left to linger, stress can quickly emerge – and growthbusiness.co.uk calls stress “one of the biggest causes of employee absence”.
For this reason, you should act to nip the problem in the bud. When employees know confidently how to handle their finances, this can prove a major factor in not only keeping their stress at bay but also motivating them to plan for the future – and a financially resilient future at that.
