With Christmas just a matter of days away, John Mullally asks employers to consider their financial and mental wellbeing provisions.
As well as turkey with all the trimmings, Christmas pudding and presents, for many Christmas also brings with it a number of pressures, including:
- Work – deadlines, year-end targets, redundancies and the Christmas party (and aftermath)!
- Home – early December pay means the January payday is a little further away and budgets are tight. Credit card bills often remain following expensive Christmas purchases
- Relationships – the first working day back after Christmas is infamously dubbed “divorce day”, which brings with it mental and financial wellbeing challenges
- Travel – January may be the month where annual train tickets increase
- Childcare – the new year may also be a time that sees nursery and afterschool club fees increase
- Family – some may only be seeing their children for part of Christmas due to family breakdowns or thinking more about family members who are no longer present. There may also be those who no longer have any family with them at all.
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This list is not exhaustive but it can give just a few illustrations of what an employee may be encountering, which may not always be evident in the workplace.
What can employers do to help?
Employers may not be able to help with everything but a simple (yet underutilised solution) would be to promote regular walks and time out from the workplace. It is widely known that walking reduces stress and promotes a positive mood as well as the physical benefits of exercising. To help facilitate this employers can promote meetings to be outside of lunch hours.
For those that have a group income protection policy, source the usage of its employee assistance programme (EAP). Some group life policies now also offer EAP as part of their proposition. You could consider tweaking the frequency or the method in which the EAP is advertised internally to make sure it is at the forefront of employees’ minds at this time of year.
Mental health first aider training is a typical investment by companies to help ensure people are available to both identify and support colleagues who are struggling with their mental health. With this being a reactive solution, if you take that further, companies now also offer wellbeing champion training to help proactively promote positive behavioural change within the workplace, setting healthy boundaries for employees to follow.
If you work in HR, what is the most sought after benefit for your employees on the back of an employee opinion survey? For many of the clients that I speak to, financial wellbeing support also comes in high on that list. What new, innovate benefits can you implement to attract and retain employees to do with financial wellbeing? What demographic are they? The benefits that you offer need to correlate with where their interests lie to get them interested in and talking about financial wellbeing.
Financial provisions
Financial coaching typically runs through an employee’s life journey and where appropriate, there is an opportunity for employees to go through their finances with a qualified financial adviser to provide an end-to-end review of their spending to see where they can focus their budget on. On travel, where employees have to attend the workplace, how flexible is this? Can they still do their hours but come in later to avoid peak fares?
Looking at childcare, is there a nursery near your office? Could there be a partnership explored if a number of employees take their children to it? It may encourage more employees to come into the office, however some nurseries are regional/national so an arrangement could be potentially be explored to accommodate those employees who have contracts where they only work from home.
Some of these adjustments can be implemented easily. However, there are always going to be conflicting priorities where a business case has to be put forward as a result of additional cost either in time or money. Where there is challenge, it is always worth considering the case of not doing it and subsequently employees being off absent. The best solution is always to have open communication channels to allow the facilitation of reasonable adjustments.
I would also add that I often speak to companies that proudly say how they invest heavily on their employee benefits, some of whom say they are also fortunate enough to have the ‘buy-in’ from their senior management team to support this. Then I ask about the take up of these benefits and their answer is always that they would like it to be more.
If you work in HR, make sure just as much time and effort goes into the communication of your benefits each year and make sure that they stay fresh, relevant and resonate with your employees. This ensures that the value of these benefits are realised by your employees just as much as it is by the organisation buying them.
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