How financial wellness programs can increase employee performance

What could your company do with an extra three hours of productive time from your employees?

According to PwC, 56% of employees who are financially stressed spend three hours or more per week dealing with, or thinking about, issues related to their personal finances. That’s a lot of lost time for companies and a big weight for employees to shoulder.

Every HR professional has (at least) one thing in common: they want to attract and retain the best talent. Some of that is out of their hands. Interpersonal issues, salary shortfalls and relocation plans can drive even the best talent away.

So let’s focus on what HR professionals do have control over: benefits packages.

One often-overlooked benefit category is financial wellness. This extends beyond the obvious – salary – and includes discount and perk programs, financial planning and credit assistance. Workforce vitality – the overall health, well-being and productivity of employees within an organization – can be vastly improved by even small improvements to existing employee financial benefits.

By providing strong financial benefits and support, HR professionals can accomplish great things for everyone:

• Employees can reduce their financial stress
• Companies can recoup some of those three weekly lost hours
• HR professionals can reduce the time spent on recruiting

How do you do that?

By prioritizing workforce vitality and employee financial wellbeing, a workplace can be transformed. Healthy, stress-free employees come to work energized and motivated. That translates to increased productivity, creativity and innovation.

And those workplaces are the ones where employees want to stay.

Such a transformative way of retaining talent and improving productivity and vitality will set you apart more than you think. Currently only 40% of employers offer financial wellness programs. By making your company one of those 40%, you set yourself up for success in multiple ways. Beyond the retention benefits, you’re making your company more attractive to new talent. 76% of employees believe that their employers should play a part in their financial wellbeing.

In other words, 40% of companies have their pick of those 76% of employees and job seekers. Simply put: adding financial wellness benefits gives you better access to a larger pool of potential employees and makes them more productive once hired.

How can you further improve your employee financial wellness?

You’re interested. You want to do this. But how do you get started? Creating a financial wellness benefits package sounds like it will take a lot of time that you just don’t have.

Start with an easy win.

Personal insurance, including home, auto and other non-health insurance policies, is a huge portion of a household budget, and often misunderstood. In 2023, most households were hit with surprise rate increases and 2024 is projected to be more of the same with a 6% national average increase to homeowners insurance rates and as much as a 23% increase in some states.

The immediate effect of this is homeowners insurance rates increasing beyond expectations – and sometimes beyond affordability. This is reality for six million homeowners. That’s 7.4% of all properties in the United States and represents $1.6 trillion in property value.

The stress of a “cross your fingers” approach to protecting their home costs their employers those three hours in lost productivity every week. Not to mention the physical and mental strain. But, as an employer, you can help.

How can we help you achieve that?

By addressing the personal insurance needs of your employees, you will have started (or improved upon) your financial wellness benefits package. Partnering with an insurance brokerage to offer neutral advice to help your employees find the coverage they need is a great start. What does the right coverage mean? Coverage for everything you want covered, at a level that will help you rebuild your life, without overpaying.

Partnering with a digital insurance brokerage like VIU by HUB is a better one.

VIU by HUB was designed with the customer at the core of our digitally enabled ecosystem. We are set up to meet them where they are – online, on the phone or on our app – and offer the same neutral advice and more than 50 insurance carrier options to everyone. Our wide choice of carriers means that we have options for even the most difficult locations and situations – and budgets. And our solutions are designed to provide customers with trusted resources and tools to manage their financial wellness needs effectively. We will find insurance for your entire staff, and we will do it in a way that integrates seamlessly into your existing systems.

Let’s talk about what makes VIU by HUB the right choice for you.