EAPs should monitor financial stress – Neyber

A financial wellbeing company is calling on employee assistance programmes (EAPs) to track and monitor calls involving employees’ financial stress. Neyber co-founder, Monica Kalia, says that EAPs track when an employee making contact due to stress or anxiety, but do not explore if this is due to financial reasons:

‘Making this adjustment gives employers three things: they can far better understand employee issues with better data, then they can fine-tune the wellbeing support they provide and then ultimately understand how well their strategy is working.’

One employer already using data from the EAP to understand employees’ financial stress is Anglian Water. The company’s reward director, Sally Purbrick, said:

‘At Anglian Water, we have had a hardship loan scheme in place for some time. We’d recognised that we were getting a number of stress-related calls, so we worked with our EAP to broaden out the categories to define financially-related stress separately.’