As an HR professional, you have many duties. One of them is to ensure that the company is taking steps to boost employee engagement. When employees are more engaged with their jobs, productivity soars, turnover drops, and you get a substantial competitive edge. After all, studies and surveys indicate that the vast majority of employees aren’t sufficiently engaged. Your business can easily stand out among the competition by taking steps to address this issue.
This blog has already covered some of the ways that you can promote greater engagement in the workplace. However, you also need to keep in mind that certain factors which may impact the degree to which employees focus on (and are satisfied with) their work might not be related to the company at all. In fact, some factors may have nothing to do with the actual working conditions. They may simply have to do with the way an employee manages his or her finances.
It’s difficult to be engaged with your job when you’re constantly worried about money. While businesses can help in this respect by always paying fair wages, HR can support employees even further by identifying ways to help them to strategically manage their finances.
Do you want to help your company’s employees to improve their financial well-being? If so, you should keep the following points in mind.
Encourage Financial Literacy
You probably have some information about the educational background of each employee at your company. However, the odds are good that you don’t know if any of them was required to take a financial literacy course in school. That means there could be significant gaps in financial literacy among the various employees at your company. Some may be savvy investors who are carefully building their own portfolios for retirement, while others might not even know how to create a monthly budget.
You can attempt to even the playing field by offering financial literacy programs. Participation in these should be optional, although you may want to encourage participation by offering some type of incentive, such as a bonus.
Are you worried that executives or managers at your company might decide that offering such a program would cost too much time and money? Give them another option by suggesting that they offer rewards to employees who can demonstrate that they’ve taken other financial literacy courses on their own. To ensure they’re getting valuable information, you might also consider giving employees a list of approved courses from which to choose. When you encourage them to learn about managing their personal finances, they’ll be more likely to take the initiative.
Maintain a List of Resources
It’s always a good idea for HR to regularly distribute newsletters or documents that provide employees with a list of valuable resources for everything from becoming healthier to improving their tech skills. Doing so is a simple way to demonstrate that you care about the company’s employees. This in and of itself may help to boost engagement.
In these newsletters, you should maintain a regularly updated list of resources that employees can use to improve their financial literacy. These can include books, podcasts, websites, videos, and even apps.
You don’t need to conduct all the research on your own to put this list together. In your emails and newsletters, ask employees to suggest their own resources. Perhaps a younger employee uses a new budgeting app that is unfamiliar to older employees. When all employees have the chance to share financial literacy tips and tools with one another, everyone benefits, and your job gets a lot easier.
Remind Employees That Help Is Available
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that employees are always thoroughly familiar with the various benefits, perks, and amenities that your company offers. There are many reasons why employees overlook certain perks. Sometimes they are not clearly explained during the onboarding process. Or else, a new perk was made available, but no one sufficiently alerted employees. In some cases, a person may simply get so bogged down in work that they forget about certain benefits that their employer offers.
This can prevent employees from taking advantage of tools that are available to them. For instance, some businesses use 401(k) providers that provide employees with at least some degree of access to financial consulting services. Employees at your organization could benefit substantially from using them if they know that they have the option. Thus, during all regular meetings, from annual events to relevant informational sessions, you can consider reminding employees about the various financial wellness perks that are already available.
Again, this isn’t simply about helping employees to create a budget. When they can manage their funds more effectively, they’ll be less stressed. This will make it easier for them to be more engaged at work.