As an employer or manager, you want your workers to be happy and satisfied. Employees who feel good about their accomplishments and experience high levels of financial wellness can bring their best selves to work every day, contributing to a more pleasant and productive workplace. Workers who feel secure also build healthier, more vibrant teams, departments, and overall workforce.

Financial stress can derail worker happiness and satisfaction and create a disconnect between workers and management. Workers stay more engaged when employers demonstrate care about their financial well-being. It makes sense—after all, they need to know that their hard work garners them some security. 

You can create a sense of partnership between management and workers by adopting the PayActiv benefit, which allows you to take three important actions.

Offering what you can

During our pandemic-induced economic crisis, 54 percent of full-time employed workers said that financial and money matters and challenges cause them more stress than do their health concerns, relationships, and jobs.[1] If you could offer them job security, decent pay, and tools that promote financial wellness, you would eliminate their top source of stress.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to promise all of that to workers in the current environment, when profits remain relatively unpredictable and potentially low. However, you can offer workers tools for financial wellness by including PayActiv in their benefits package, at no cost to you.

PayActiv increases security by giving workers Earned Wage Access (EWA)—access to their wages as they earn them. Budgeting tools, savings tools, financial counseling, and other features are also available through the PayActiv app to help workers cultivate financial wellness. Best of all for the budget, PayActiv is free for employers to adopt and offer, and is free to low-cost for employees to use.

Even in an unstable economic environment, employers clearly have something valuable they can offer their employees.

Reminding workers that you care

Financial stress impacts workers’ health and strains personal and professional relationships. It also renders workers more distracted and ineffective at work. Put those elements together, and you get elevated health-care costs, increased absenteeism, crushed morale, and strangled productivity.[2] You also create unwanted distance between management and workers.

Workers who dedicate themselves to the office forty hours per week and can’t pay their bills on time might wonder if you recognize their efforts and if you care about them at all. You can demonstrate that you do care about their financial wellness and overall well-being by offering PayActiv and EWA.

Demonstrating to workers that you value their time, efforts, and humanity can also increase the collective sense of well-being in the company.

Offering a path to dignity for workers

Even more so than usual, pandemic life presents workers with a giant obstacle course to navigate and overcome in order to survive. It’s packed with constant risk and loss, and it demands that workers tap into already scarce resources. Now in particular, workers’ dignity sits precariously on a cliff.

To keep them from falling off that cliff, you can offer these battered warriors a path to pride or dignity. With PayActiv, workers can track their wages and spending, and talk to financial counselors to determine how to best navigate financial challenges and hardships and plan for an uncertain future. Helping workers garner a sense of financial security and solvency helps boost morale, too.

Offering what you can, demonstrating that you care, and offering a path to dignity all create partnership between management and workers. Workers get to give their labor to a company that cares for them, and management gets a healthier, more productive workforce.

PayActiv is here for you to help you take these three important actions. Together we can powerfully navigate our global pandemic and create a sense of partnership.

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[1] PwC’s 9th Annual Employee Financial Wellness Survey: 2020 COVID-19 Update, PwC, May 2020, https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/private-company-services/images/pwc-9th-annual-employee-financial-wellness-survey-2020.pdf.

[2] Special Report: Financial Stress and the Bottom Line, PwC, September 2017, https://www.pwc.com/us/en/private-company-services/publications/assets/pwc-financial-stress-and-bottom-line.pdf.