How employers might help staff in the financial crisis

The ‘cost of living crisis’ is set to continue during 2023 and your employees may be finding it difficult to make ends meet. Knowing your people is more important now than ever, so that you can spot changes in people’s behaviour. A historically good performer suddenly coming in late or making mistakes could indicate that they are experiencing difficulties personally.

Our advice would be to meet with anyone who you believe could be suffering and consider ways of helping them. Best practice would be to check how employees are coping during your normal one to one / appraisal meetings. Looking at their individual circumstances will be key. You may have someone who would benefit from working in the office more frequently to reduce energy bills but similarly you may have another employee who would prefer to work from home to reduce travel costs.

Here are some ideas for how you may be able to help your employees and as always, we are only a phone call away if you would like any support:

• Pay rises, where affordable to the business
• One off cost of living bonuses
• Creative flexible working options to reduce childcare expenses
• Providing general help and advice through employee assistance programmes
• Salary sacrifice schemes such as pension, childcare vouchers (available if you participated in such a scheme prior to 2018)
• Income streaming – This is where you allow staff to access some of their salary before pay day to help cover unforeseen events during the month rather than using credit cards or asking for loans/advances.
• Enhancing statutory sick pay provision and other statutory entitlements
• Paying travel expenses up front for employees rather than asking them to pay and re-claim
• Signpost employees to external support agencies to help with debt, grants and other forms of financial assistance.

Guidance about Government support can be found via: https://www.gov.uk/cost-of-living, if you would like to understand how you might support your employees contact our team here.

Sources:
CIPD / HR inform
www.gov.uk