The United States trains its Marine Corps members to “improvise, adapt, and overcome” to navigate obstacles. As a company leader, you may feel like you’ve been in training yourself for several months as you’ve traversed the constantly changing obstacle course that is COVID-19.

Consider it time well spent, honing your skills so you can improvise, adapt, and overcome one of the biggest challenges you’ll face going forward: budget management. With an unstable global economy and constantly shifting requirements for reopening your business, it is difficult to know how you can possibly predict profit and decide how to spend money.

This predicament poses an additional challenge to those responsible for hiring, training, and retaining employees. How do you know how many workers you can afford to keep? How many workers you can hire? How you can attract top talent with the limited bucks you have? Budget management in this climate likely feels difficult, if not impossible.

Even outside a pandemic, it’s often difficult to answer these questions, and now, with the spread of COVID-19, you have to ask and answer these questions more often and make decisions based on less-than-complete information.

In other words, you have to improvise, adapt, and overcome. You improvise by working with what you have. You adapt by staying nimble, adjusting to constant change as it arrives. You overcome by continuing to serve and support your workforce with valuable benefits you can afford.

Adding PayActiv to your list of benefits helps you work with what you have (an unpredictable budget) and stay nimble as your budget continues to fluctuate. It adds stability to your budget management and helps you overcome. Here’s how:

PayActiv offers employers one stable, predictable, highly beneficial item on the budget. The service comes at no cost to your company and zero to minimal cost to your employees. That means that no matter how often your budget changes, this line item will remain the same.

It can also help stabilize your workforce by helping workers improvise, adapt, and overcome.

With PayActiv, workers gain instant access to wages they’ve earned, giving them greater immediate control of their finances and more flexibility to pay expenses as they arise. Other PayActiv features, like bill pay, automatic savings, budget management, and free financial counseling, help workers establish a greater sense of financial security and ability to plan. This helps them better adapt to a volatile workforce and overcome their own budgeting challenges.

All of this can help workers reduce their stress. Workers stressed about their financial situations are more likely to struggle to pay their monthly bills, carry credit card balances from month to month, and use their credit cards to pay for monthly essentials.[1] PayActiv helps them pay bills on time and avoid high interest debt.

This free-to-you benefit makes your workers happier and your HR department healthier. That’s important because employees’ financial stress can influence a company’s well-being. It can raise healthcare costs, reduce productivity, increase absenteeism, and lower employees’ abilities to save.[2]

In other words, PayActiv can help your workers feel less stressed and more satisfied, which leads to higher retention rates and the aforementioned stable workforce. With a stable workforce, budget management becomes a bit more predictable.

In this difficult, volatile time, that sense of stability can prove game-changing for employers and employees alike, by allowing us to improvise, adapt, and overcome.

---

[1] “Special Report: Financial Stress and the Bottom Line,” PWC, September 2017

[2] “Special Report: Financial Stress and the Bottom Line,” PWC, September 2017