Financial Wellness Is the Benefit Your Employees Are Too Embarrassed to Ask For

I manage benefits for a healthcare system with close to 900 employees — nurses, administrators, dietary staff, lab techs, security. A few years back, we added a financial wellness platform to our benefits package. I did not expect the response I got.

Within the first three months, utilization was almost 40 percent. For a voluntary benefits add-on, that's remarkable. What surprised me even more was where the engagement was coming from. It wasn't just the hourly staff I expected to lean on it. It was clinical managers in their late forties worrying about retirement. It was a payroll specialist in her fifties who'd never used a budget tool in her life. It was a nurse who had a question about her student loan options and didn't know who else to ask.

Financial stress is not a compensation problem. It's an information and access problem. And if you're not addressing it in your benefits package right now, you're leaving one of the most impactful — and most overlooked — employee wellness levers completely untouched.

Why Financial Wellness Is a Productivity Issue, Not Just a Personal One

Let's establish something clearly: when employees are under significant financial stress, it doesn't stay at home. Research published in the Journal of Financial Therapy and supported by a range of employer surveys has found that financially stressed employees report lower productivity, higher absenteeism, and greater difficulty concentrating at work. PwC's Employee Financial Wellness Survey has found consistently over multiple years that a significant portion of full-time employees say financial stress affects their ability to focus on work.

This is not a soft issue. Distracted employees make errors. Errors in healthcare settings have consequences I don't need to spell out. But even outside healthcare, an employee whose brain is running a background process of "how do I cover rent this month" is not operating at full capacity. That has a real cost to your organization.

The problem HR has historically had with this is that financial stress feels personal — almost intrusive to address. And so we don't. We add an EAP with a financial counselor buried in the menu and call it done. Most employees never find it.

What a Real Financial Wellness Benefit Looks Like

I'll tell you what has actually worked in my environment, with the caveat that every workforce is different and you should always loop in legal and your benefits broker before making changes to your offerings.

1. On-demand financial coaching, not just a hotline.The difference matters. A hotline implies crisis. On-demand coaching implies "this is a normal thing that normal people use to make better decisions." Framing is everything. Employees are far more likely to engage with something that feels like a resource than something that feels like a help line for people in trouble.

2. Student loan assistance or guidance. If you have employees under 40 in your workforce — and almost everyone does — student debt is a real factor in their financial lives. You don't have to offer loan repayment (though that is an increasingly common benefit) to provide value. Even partnering with a platform that helps employees understand their repayment options and potential forgiveness eligibility can be genuinely impactful.

3. Emergency savings tools and earned wage access. Earned wage access — the ability for an employee to access a portion of their earned pay before the regular pay cycle — has gotten more attention in recent years as a financial wellness tool. It's not right for every organization, and there are compliance considerations to work through carefully. But for workforces where paycheck-to-paycheck living is common, the ability to access earned wages in a genuine emergency without turning to payday lending is significant. Check your state regulations before moving on this one.

4. Retirement plan education that actually reaches people. We offer a 403(b) to every eligible employee. What we found was that a meaningful chunk of staff — particularly newer hires and hourly employees — weren't enrolled, often because the enrollment process confused them or because they didn't think they could afford to contribute. Adding a single 30-minute live session (not a PDF, not a webinar recording, a live session with a real person who takes questions) to our onboarding process increased enrollment rates noticeably within the first year.

Getting It Into Your Next Open Enrollment

Open enrollment is your best annual window for introducing financial wellness benefits, because employees are already in "I'm reading about my benefits" mode. Here's my practical checklist:

• Audit what you already offer. Chances are your EAP has financial counseling components that are underutilized. Start by promoting what exists before adding new vendors.

• Survey employees — briefly — about what financial topics feel most relevant to them. You might be surprised. I was.

• If you're adding a new platform or benefit, do not bury it in the enrollment materials. Give it a dedicated communication that goes out separately, explains it in plain language, and tells people specifically what problem it solves.

• Train your managers to mention it. Managers don't need to discuss personal finances with their teams — they just need to know the benefit exists and to say "if you're curious, HR has a resource for that" when it's relevant.

• Track utilization and report back to leadership. Financial wellness benefits with low visibility become line items that disappear in the next budget cycle. Numbers keep them alive.

I know open enrollment is already overwhelming — I live it every year. But adding financial wellness to the conversation doesn't have to mean more complexity. Often it just means making what already exists easier to find and understand. That's something HR is actually pretty good at when we decide to prioritize it.

Questions? Reach out anytime.

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WorkPlayEngage is a product of Dieza Publishing. © 2026 WorkPlayEngage. All rights reserved.

Privacy & Security Note: WorkPlayEngage templates are native Google Sheets. We do not host your data, and we never have access to your employee names or internal metrics. Your engagement remains 100% private within your organization’s Google Drive.

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