Businesses that fail to tackle their employees’ financial stress are more likely to encounter poor work performance, lack of engagement, mental health issues and staff absenteeism, a new report from Neyber has claimed. Since last year, there has been a significant increase in the number of employees affected by financial worries; up from 58 percent to 63 percent, as well as those with less than one month’s savings; up from 24 percent to 32 percent. This stress on individuals is having a severe business impact. One in four employees said they had lost sleep over money troubles in the last year, one in ten said that they couldn’t focus on work and 6 percent said they had had to take time off work. All this adds up to a substantial cost for employers to bear. Neyber has calculated that the lost productivity and increased absence and employee turnover associated with financial stress costs UK companies in the region of £120.7 billion every year.

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A new report from the Office for National Statistics suggests that the number of sickness days taken by UK workers has almost halved over the past two decades to reach a record low. It dropped from an average of 7.2 days in 1993 to 4.1 days in 2017, and had been steadily falling since 1999. The total days lost for all workers last year was 131.2 million, down from 137.3 million in 2016 and 178.3 million in 1993. Since the recession, sickness absence rates have declined by 0.5 percentage points to 1.9 per cent last year. The reasons are not explored in the report but one possible explanation would be the growing number of people prepared to work when they should really take time off. A May report from the CIPD claims that the number of companies reporting a rise in employees going into work when they were ill had more than tripled since 2010 and warned that organisations should do more to discourage “presenteeism”.

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