By Alex Cook Founder and Chief Executive Officer of fintech company Wealthbit.
Wellness days, EAPs, flexible hours — employers have spent years building programmes that address issues around health, mental health, work-life balance and more. Everything except the one thing actually keeping people up at night: Money stress.
This isn’t a story about rising costs or a hard year. Financial stress doesn’t wait for the economy to get worse, and it doesn’t disappear when it gets better, because it was never really about what things cost.
Some of the most financially stressed people we work with are senior leaders on strong salaries who have simply never had the systems to make that salary work for them. That’s an expensive blind spot: replacing a senior leader costs far more than replacing junior staff, and the people most likely to leave are often the ones you can least afford to lose. Anyone without the right support can be affected, whatever they earn.
The impact? Financial stress creates tension in relationships and eats into sleep and health. At work, it looks like someone running a confident 9am stand-up after spending the commute working out whether their card will go through at the petrol station. Nobody in the room knows.
The shame sits right next to the stress. Few people feel comfortable talking about their burgeoning debt, escalating household expenses and mounting bills, especially at work where they want to appear professional and in control.
No one does their best work with one eye on their bank balance.
Companies see the symptoms of financial stress in lower engagement, higher presenteeism and absenteeism and even greater retention risk. Absenteeism is easier to spot and address as the empty desks are a clear indication that people have not shown up.
What has an even greater impact on businesses and is by far harder to track is when employees are physically at work but have “checked out” mentally. The GIBS October Health Workplace Well-Being Report puts a number on unaddressed strain like this: Mental-health-related presenteeism alone costs South African employers R96,500 per employee a year, about seven times the cost of absenteeism.
In our Financial Stress Report over 80% said financial worries affected their energy, focus and motivation at work. The data also shows that people aren’t sitting still. They’re looking for ways to make it work, even if it means more work, or a different employer:
Almost half of respondents said they already have or are planning a side hustle to address their financial stress, with seven in 10 looking to address money issues with a job change.
While competitive salaries are an important hygiene factor, people’s ability to manage their income effectively, deal with unexpected expenses and make informed financial decisions is a fundamental requirement for financial wellbeing.
Two employees may earn the same salary but experience very different levels of financial stress due to their different circumstances, financial knowledge and existing commitments.
That’s why the conversation needs to move beyond asking whether employees are being paid enough. The next question has to be: Are we doing enough to help our employees put financial systems in place to actually make the most of that salary?
A bigger budget line will not fix this and neither will one more seminar on saving. In fact, most existing benefits aren’t addressing this structurally at all. What actually matters comes down to two things:
The first is clarity over knowledge. The people who manage money well aren’t the ones who know the most, they’re the ones who are clear on what they earn, what they owe, and what they’re actually trying to build. Most financial stress isn’t a knowledge gap, it’s confusion about what “enough” even looks like for your own life and context.
The second is systems over willpower. Nobody sticks to a resolution through a bad month. A habit that runs on its own, money moved the day after payday, a number checked every Friday, holds up regardless of how anyone’s feeling that week. Small and repeated beats big and occasional, every time.
Get those two things right, and people stop reacting to their money and start getting ahead of it. That’s the actual return: steadier focus, better decisions, and a team that stays because life feels manageable.
©Higher Education Media Services.