Finance is one of those topics that many people would rather not talk about. It feels personal. Private. And for a lot of people, more than a little bit embarrassing, especially when it feels out of control.
But here’s the thing: financial stress doesn’t stay at the front door when your employees come to work. It follows them in, sits at their desk, and quietly chips away at their concentration, their motivation, and their mental health.
Financial wellbeing has firmly established itself as the fourth pillar of workplace wellbeing, alongside physical, mental, and social health. And if you are a wellbeing leader, that is a pillar you need to be taking seriously.
So where do you start? At an individual level, one of the most powerful steps anyone can take towards financial wellbeing is simply knowing their numbers. Not their blood pressure numbers (though you should absolutely be getting those checked during Know Your Numbers Week, too!) but their financial ones.
In this article, we will cover why financial self-awareness is so transformative, the six steps your employees can take to get on top of their finances, and what you, as an employer or wellbeing leader, can actually do to help make it happen.
Table of Contents
Why Financial Wellbeing Matters in the Workplace
It is tempting to view an employee’s personal finances as their own business. And to an extent, that is true. But it is a bit like saying an employee’s physical health is their own business. Technically correct, but missing the bigger picture entirely.
Financial stress is one of the most significant contributors to poor mental health in the UK, and the relationship runs both ways. Financial strain exacerbates mental health difficulties, and poor mental health makes financial management significantly harder. The Money and Pensions Service found in a survey of 3,000 UK adults that 91% of people who are struggling with their mental health avoid talking about money, often because of embarrassment, guilt or shame. When that stigma goes unchallenged in the workplace, employees suffer in silence and problems compound.
And the cost to business is very real. Deloitte’s research puts the annual cost of poor employee mental health to UK employers at up to £51 billion, driven by absenteeism, presenteeism and staff turnover. The same research found that for every £1 invested in supporting employee mental health, employers see an average return of £4.70. Financial stress is a significant driver of that mental health burden, so reducing it is not just the right thing to do. It is a sound business decision.
The good news is that you do not need to become a financial advice service to make a meaningful difference. What you can do is create a culture where financial wellbeing is on the agenda, where employees have access to useful resources, and where the taboo around talking about money is gently but deliberately dismantled.
And it all starts with helping your employees know their numbers.
Why Knowing Your Numbers Matters
1. Clarity and Control
For many people, financial anxiety stems not from the actual state of their finances, but from the uncertainty around them. When you do not know exactly what is coming in and going out each month, it is easy for worry to fill the gaps, often in ways that are far worse than reality.
When employees genuinely understand their financial picture (their income, outgoings, debts, and savings) they immediately feel more in control. That sense of control is transformative. It shifts the relationship with money from something that happens to you to something you actively manage. And active management, even in small ways, is the first step towards real financial health.
As an employer, you can encourage this kind of clarity by making financial wellbeing a visible part of your overall wellbeing strategy, through awareness campaigns, signposting free tools, and normalising the conversation at every level of the business.
2. Goal Setting
Clear financial data is the foundation of realistic goal setting. Whether an employee is trying to save for a house deposit, pay off a credit card, or simply build a small emergency buffer, knowing exactly where they stand financially is the only way to build an achievable plan. Without that baseline, it is almost impossible to make meaningful progress. You cannot plot a route to somewhere if you do not know where you are starting from.
Helping employees understand that financial goals do not need to be grand to be worthwhile is in itself a meaningful act of support. Employees who feel financially stable tend to be more present, more focused, and more engaged at work.
3. Identifying Spending Patterns
One of the most eye-opening moments in anyone’s financial journey is when they actually sit down and look at where their money is going. Subscription services that have not been used in months. The daily coffee that quietly adds up to £600 a year. A takeaway habit that has steadily replaced the weekly shop.
Analysing spending patterns does not mean telling people to live like monks. It means making intentional choices about money rather than reactive ones. For many employees, this kind of awareness alone can be enough to unlock genuine, lasting change.
4. Debt Management
Debt is one of the most significant drivers of financial stress and one that often feels completely overwhelming without a clear plan. The first step towards managing debt is simply knowing what you are dealing with: the total amount owed, the interest rates, the minimum repayments, and a realistic timeline for paying it down.
This can feel daunting. But it is far less daunting than the alternative, which is avoidance. Once the full picture is clear, a plan becomes possible. And a plan, even a small and imperfect one, is infinitely better than not looking.
As an employer, you can support employees here by pointing them towards reputable, impartial services like MoneyHelper, the government-backed service run by the Money and Pensions Service, which offers free and confidential debt guidance and budgeting tools. Signposting resources like this costs you nothing and can make an enormous difference.
5. Building Savings and Investments
It is a commonly held belief that saving is only possible once every other financial concern has been resolved. In practice, building even a small savings habit (as little as £20 a month) can dramatically change someone’s relationship with money. The psychological safety net that comes from even a modest emergency fund is genuinely significant. It changes the way people approach unexpected costs, reducing the panic that a broken boiler or a car repair can otherwise trigger.
Helping employees understand their workplace pension is also a missed opportunity that many businesses overlook entirely. Many employees may be less inclined to take any action on their workplace pension because they assume it is already being handled for them, when in reality the default contribution rate is unlikely to be sufficient for a comfortable retirement. A little awareness goes a very long way here.
6 Steps to Take Control of Your Financial Numbers
Now for the practical bit. These are the six steps that can help your employees take real ownership of their financial health, along with what you can actively do as a wellbeing leader to support each one.
Step 1: Track Your Income and Expenses
This is the foundation of everything else. Encourage employees to list every source of income and every category of expenditure. Apps like Monzo, Emma, or Snoop link to bank accounts and categorise spending automatically, making this far less painful than pulling together bank statements manually. For those who prefer something more hands-on, a simple spreadsheet works just as well.
The goal here is not perfection. It is awareness. Even a rough overview is enormously more useful than no overview at all.
Step 2: Create a Budget
Once income and expenses are tracked, the next step is building a budget that both reflects financial reality and points in the right direction. A popular framework to share with employees is the 50/30/20 rule: roughly 50% of take-home income on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% on savings or debt repayment. It is a useful starting point, even if the reality ends up looking a bit different.
As a wellbeing leader, you can support this step by making budgeting tools visible, whether that is a link in your internal newsletter to MoneyHelper’s free budget planner, or a mention during your next team wellbeing session. You do not need to run a financial masterclass to help employees take this step. You just need to remove the friction.
Step 3: Monitor Your Credit Score
A credit score affects everything from mortgage applications to mobile phone contracts, yet many people have no idea what theirs is or what influences it. Encourage employees to check their score using free tools like Experian, ClearScore, or Credit Karma (all of which are genuinely free, no catch involved).
Understanding the score and knowing how to improve it over time (paying bills on time, reducing outstanding credit card balances, checking for errors) puts employees back in control of a number that has a very real impact on their financial options.
Step 4: Assess Your Net Worth
Net worth sounds like something that only applies to CEOs and lottery winners. In reality, it is one of the simplest and most revealing numbers in personal finance: assets minus liabilities. What you own, minus what you owe.
For many people, particularly younger employees or those who have navigated significant life changes, this number will be negative to begin with. And that is completely normal. The real value is in tracking it over time. Watching net worth trend upwards, even slowly, is a powerful motivator. It makes financial progress visible in a way that a monthly bank balance often does not.
Step 5: Set Financial Goals
Short-term and long-term financial goals give direction and purpose to all of the steps above. Short-term goals might include building a £500 emergency fund, clearing a specific debt, or cutting a recurring expense. Long-term goals might involve buying a property, boosting pension contributions, or building an investment portfolio.
Goals do not need to be huge to be meaningful. As a wellbeing leader, simply creating space for employees to think about their financial future, through awareness campaigns or by pointing them towards MoneyHelper’s goal-setting tools, can prompt reflection that leads to real change.
Step 6: Review Regularly
Financial circumstances change. A new job, a house move, a growing family, a redundancy: life has a habit of shifting the goalposts. A financial plan that was right six months ago might need a rethink today.
Encouraging employees to do a monthly financial review, even just 20 minutes to check in on their budget, track their savings progress, and note any changes to their outgoings, turns what would otherwise be an annual reckoning into a manageable habit. Tying this into awareness campaigns like Talk Money Week each November is a great way to prompt those regular check-ins across your whole workforce.
What Can Employers Do to Support Financial Wellbeing?
There is a lot you can do to support the financial wellbeing of your workforce meaningfully, and none of it requires you to become a financial adviser.
Start by understanding what your employees actually need
Before investing in any initiative, it is worth identifying the real pressure points in your specific workforce. Our Employee Wellbeing Survey is a great way to do exactly this. We build and deliver the survey to your team and provide you with a clear, anonymised report that tells you everything you need to know before deciding where to focus your efforts. Financial stress may be a concern for your workforce, but it is rarely the only one, and understanding the full picture ensures your wellbeing strategy actually addresses what your people need.
Workplace Wellbeing ROI Calculator
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Understand the business case
If you need to persuade leadership to invest in employee wellbeing more broadly, our free Workplace Wellbeing ROI Calculator is a brilliant place to start. Financial stress is a significant contributor to absenteeism and presenteeism, and being able to put real numbers to the cost of poor employee wellbeing is often the most persuasive argument you can make. (You read that in your director’s voice, didn’t you?)
Signpost to free, impartial resources
MoneyHelper, Citizens Advice, and StepChange all offer excellent and genuinely free financial guidance. Making sure your employees know these resources exist and normalising the act of using them is a simple but meaningful step. A poster in the break room and a line in your next internal newsletter might be all it takes for someone to finally pick up the phone. As the Money and Pensions Service found, 91% of people struggling with their mental health avoid talking about money, so reducing the friction to getting help matters enormously.
Enlist your Wellbeing Champions
If you have a Wellbeing Champions Programme, financial wellbeing is a brilliant area for your Champions to promote, particularly around awareness campaigns like Talk Money Week in November. Well-trained Champions can help reduce the stigma around financial conversations, raise awareness of available resources, and create an environment where employees feel comfortable asking for help. If you do not yet have a Champions Programme, it is worth reading our guide on how to build one.
Look at the bigger wellbeing picture
Financial stress and mental health are deeply intertwined, and supporting one often means addressing the other. Our workplace counselling service provides employees with confidential one-to-one support from qualified practitioners, which can be invaluable for those whose financial worries have developed into something more significant. And if stress and anxiety are broader concerns across your workforce, our Stress and Resilience course helps employees build the coping skills to navigate difficult periods, including financial ones.
Financial wellbeing is not a nice-to-have anymore. With the cost of living continuing to put pressure on household budgets across the UK, financial stress is something a significant proportion of your workforce is likely experiencing right now, whether they are talking about it or not.
Awareness is where change begins. Helping your employees know their numbers (their income, outgoings, debts, credit score, and net worth) is one of the most genuinely empowering things you can do to support their financial health. And as an employer, creating the conditions for those conversations to happen is both good for your people and good for your business.
Here at New Leaf Health, we have been supporting workplace wellbeing for nearly 30 years. Whether you want to understand your employees’ needs first or build a broader wellbeing strategy, we are here to help. Browse our wellbeing services or get in touch with the team to get started.
