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Cost of living impacts on employees and employers

Steve Bridger

Inflationary pressures and the soaring cost of living is playing on workers' minds. But also on employers.

We have some resources to help organisations who want to support the financial wellbeing of their employees through the cost of living crisis, and we've been discussing this here. Our discussion about mid-year cost-of-living payments and one-off support for employees has now been read over 10,000 times. Charles Cotton, CIPD's Performance and Reward Advisor has also written about the pros and cons of doing that here.

Please continue to share any tangible steps you are taking to support your employees. As well as one-of payments, are you supporting your staff with travel loans? Have you introduced or extended flexible hours, allowed staff to 'sell' holiday? Are you considering encouraging your employees to come into the office where it will be warmer over the colder months?

But I recognose this is also a real challenge - a crisis, even - for employers themselves. 

Can you afford to do anything? Do you think it's your responsibility to do anything? Are you reviewing benefits? Do you expect to have to make redundancies to offset rising energy bills? 

Please let us know (below) what additional advice and resources you would find helpful in this area.

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  • Hi Steve

    I saw your post and thought I would reach out to hopefully get yours and other peoples thoughts on an idea I have had to help our employees with the cost of living crisis. Our business is not in the best place financially so we are unable to give one-off cost of living payments, or raise the pay rates right now. Our next pay review is in January and to be honest I don't think the proposals we are thinking about for our budget are still going to cut it with inflation & bills souring as they are. We have had a "Financial Wellbeing" week recently where we made a lot of information accessible to employees on how to budget, where to find discounts, counsellors if struggling with money worries etc. But I really want to do more and have been thinking about what else we can do, bearing in mind the business has no money to play with currently.

    One idea I had was to arrange our own food bank and allowing employees to take a "box" of food home. I'm still trying to work out the logistics of this, and whether I need to set some boundaries (if you can think of any then please let me know). I have looked online to see if other employers have done something similar, but not found anything. My thought process so far is to open it up to employees for a couple of weeks to make donations and then once we see how much we have, sorting all this into boxes and allowing employees to take a box home. We probably wouldn't be able to keep it up long term as there's only two of us in the office, so was thinking of doing it for a month. I know its not much, but its something. Any thoughts?
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  • Hi Steve

    I saw your post and thought I would reach out to hopefully get yours and other peoples thoughts on an idea I have had to help our employees with the cost of living crisis. Our business is not in the best place financially so we are unable to give one-off cost of living payments, or raise the pay rates right now. Our next pay review is in January and to be honest I don't think the proposals we are thinking about for our budget are still going to cut it with inflation & bills souring as they are. We have had a "Financial Wellbeing" week recently where we made a lot of information accessible to employees on how to budget, where to find discounts, counsellors if struggling with money worries etc. But I really want to do more and have been thinking about what else we can do, bearing in mind the business has no money to play with currently.

    One idea I had was to arrange our own food bank and allowing employees to take a "box" of food home. I'm still trying to work out the logistics of this, and whether I need to set some boundaries (if you can think of any then please let me know). I have looked online to see if other employers have done something similar, but not found anything. My thought process so far is to open it up to employees for a couple of weeks to make donations and then once we see how much we have, sorting all this into boxes and allowing employees to take a box home. We probably wouldn't be able to keep it up long term as there's only two of us in the office, so was thinking of doing it for a month. I know its not much, but its something. Any thoughts?
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