This post was originally published on LinkedIn by Catherine Scagnelli.
Last week, benefits and HR leaders at WorldatWork’s annual conference weren’t asking us to make the case for emergency relief.
They were telling us they already had one.
It was the 401k withdrawal spikes they’d been watching. The employees showing up in their offices in crisis. The quiet, growing awareness that something in their existing offerings wasn’t catching people early enough. Not at a time when groceries and gas are pushing budgets further and further with little relief in sight.
Leader after leader came to our booth not with questions about whether this mattered, but with the weight of already knowing it did. That’s a different conversation than we’ve had at conferences before. And it changed the energy of the whole week.
We’ve been connecting employee financial crisis to benefits utilization internally for a while — pointing to 401k hardship withdrawals as a signal that employees need relief before they reach the point of raiding their retirement savings. In San Antonio, we didn’t have to make that argument. The room made it for us.
If employees are in financial crisis, the rest of your benefits stack can’t do its job
In our workshop with Josh Lipscomb of Varsity Brands, we put a deceptively simple question to a room full of benefits professionals: which of your current programs assumes employees have a financial cushion to use them?
- The EAP that requires taking time off work.
- The wellness benefit that costs something to access.
- The retirement program employees are raiding instead of building.
None of these fail because they’re badly designed. They fail when financial instability breaks the conditions they were built for.
Employee emergency relief isn’t a standalone offering. It’s what helps the rest of an organization’s financial well-being program function as designed.
Josh lived that in real time when Hurricane Helene hit last fall, while Varsity Brands was still mid-conversation with us. Dozens of employees with destroyed or flooded homes. A company that wanted to help and needed the right infrastructure to do it quickly and equitably. The benefit that builds trust is the one that shows up when everything else falls apart.
What came after was just eye-opening. Data from their emergency grants program revealed that medical expenses were driving the bulk of hardship requests. It revealed a data point that the team hadn’t fully seen before. And that insight led directly to implementing a hospital cost negotiation tool. The act of showing up for employees in financial crisis through Grant Circle’s emergency relief program opened the door to understanding them better.
The leaders we met this week don’t need convincing — they need a path forward
Here’s what we also heard clearly: knowing the need exists and knowing how to act on it are two different things.
HR leaders at mid-sized companies are managing dozens of vendor relationships, communications toolkits they don’t have bandwidth to use, and workforces whose financial stress is largely invisible until it surfaces as something else — an absence, a health claim, a request to tap retirement savings early. The last thing they need is a program that adds to that load.
One benefits leader put it plainly: “I already have 39 communication toolkits. I don’t want one more.”
Many of the attendees we spoke with already knew what their workforce needed. The challenge is often the internal conversation standing between that knowledge and action — a CHRO who feels the current well-being program is comprehensive enough, or a CFO who sees a new vendor where they’d rather see a line item removed.
What we’ve found is that the framing matters more than the argument. This isn’t a case for adding something new. It’s a case for making what you already have work better. If employees can’t afford the copay, the health benefit isn’t reaching them. If they’re raiding retirement savings to cover an emergency, the financial wellness program isn’t either. Emergency relief doesn’t replace those investments, it’s what allows them to function as designed.
What we’re taking home
We left San Antonio with more conviction than we arrived with. Not because we changed minds, but because the minds were already there.
The question benefits leaders are sitting with isn’t whether their workforce needs this. It’s whether they can implement something that actually fits — into their bandwidth, their vendor relationships, and their budget reality.
Those are answerable questions. And they’re exactly the ones we want to be in the room for.
If this resonated, we’d love to keep the conversation going.
