In our most recent Impact Report, we collected key findings from April 2020 – April 2021 on why workers need emergency financial assistance and how they use it. The research coincided with the start of COVID-19, allowing us to understand how the pandemic uniquely impacted the need for emergency assistance grants.
Employers of choice prioritize the financial wellbeing of their employees
- $250B in wage productivity is lost to financial stress every year.
- 73% of employees would be attracted to a company that cares about their financial health, whether or not the use the financial health benefits.
- The #1 issue cited by Americans defining just business behavior is how employers treat their workforce.
In conversations with multiple HR teams across a wide array of sectors and regions, we hear consistent and competing concerns. Everyone is debating how to compete for the best talent in an incredibly competitive labor market. Potential employees are more focused on working for companies that care about the employees whole self in new and interesting ways, including a pronounced focus on financial wellbeing offerings. However, many organizations are strapped for time and resources (only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic), complicating and often delaying implementation of new, innovative employee programs.
So, how do employers compete for the best talent AND develop programs that support employee financial wellbeing?
Our Grant Circle platform aims to solve for this particular challenge in two ways:
- We make it easy to support employee wellbeing by offering emergency cash to employees in financial need. We developed Grant Circle to relieve the administrative burden for your team. We work with you to design a program that makes sense for your organization, review and approve all grant applications, and ensure the money coming in and out of your fund is IRS compliant and tax advantaged. In the midst of a talent war fueled by the Great Reprioritization, investment in an employee relief fund positions a company as an employer of choice.
- Second, we conduct significant and regular impact analysis, giving us and our employer partners unique insight into why the right money at the right time matters for your workforce. This in-depth analysis not only gives us a deep understanding of the effects that emergency cash has in people’s lives but it also fuels constant product innovation and improvements.
Our full impact report takes a deep dive into that data to show you why employees ask for money, what they use it for, and how it helps.
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We’d like to acknowledge The BlackRock Foundation and Citi for their support of this research initiative.
