How Much Is Financial Stress Is Costing Your Company?

Financial stress is real.  It can be very costly to a company.  It’s really hard to quantify.  As the owner of a company, you always feel like you are paying your employees enough.  You care for their welfare, but you can’t be all things to all people but it’s great to empower employees.  It’s tough.

Living with financial stress haunts you.  It’s top of mind.  When you spend money, it feels like a thousand paper cuts.  A trickle becomes a river and all of a sudden you are in a spiral that seems like it will never ever end.  It’s depressing.  It affects your health.

Financial stress is the single largest source of stress for employees. It’s such a big driver of stress, financial stress is larger than all other stresses combined.

Holberg Financial is the number one rated financial wellness company on G2.  They just released a new budgeting tool to empower people.  Employees can build a realistic budget and get real time feedback on whether or not they spending too much or not enough in different categories. Holberg is helping thousands of users save more this year, while also creating plans to eliminate debt.  Holberg is a WLV portfolio company and I am on the board.

People that use Holberg are 64% more productive at work.  The burden lifts off their backs.  We have seen customers in tears because they are so happy.  Using Holberg made the impossible possible.

If your company isn’t using Holberg, you should be.  Here is how to quantify how much it’s costing your business.

Adding It Up: The Cost of Presenteeism Due to Financial Stress

Knowing that employees experience 10 instances a month of presenteeism due to financial stress, we can estimate how much it is costing your company each year. First, let’s assume each instance of checking your finances at work is about 10 minutes (a call to pay a bill, checking a budget, changing a 401k investment allocation, etc.), and the average salary at your workplace is $50,000.

That’s 100 minutes of presenteeism each month, which is 1,200 minutes of presenteeism per year. Equivalently, that’s a whopping 20 hours of lost productivity each year per employee due to financial stress!

An average work year is 2,000 hours, so if your average salary is $50,000, that’s a $25 per hour earnings rate.

Consequently, losing 20 hours is equivalent to losing $500 per employee per year. That may or may not be a jarring number, but assuming you have 100 employees at your company, that’s $50,000 in lost productivity. Essentially, that’s like paying a full-time person who doesn’t even exist!

If you are slightly larger with 250 employees, that’s $125,000 in loss due to presenteeism being caused by financial stress.

A 1,000 employee company would lose $500,000 each year. That’s a significant cost center lurking beneath the surface.

Holberg is unbiased.  They aren’t trying to make money selling financial products like a wealth management company or other benefits company.  All they care about is the health of employees.