Cost of living impacts on employees and employers

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.

Parents
  • As with all businesses, the only way we could significantly increase staff pay would be to put the cost of services up - impacting customers, driving up inflation, and moving the problem on. It's very hard to identify the right support for our staff in the short and longer term, but it doesn't mean we aren't worried about how our teams will adjust.
  • As with all businesses, the only way we could significantly increase staff pay would be to put the cost of services up


    Although this is certainly true for *some* businesses, it's far from true for *all* businesses. It would be nice to see publicly-traded companies put a moratorium on dividend payments and push their profits back into employee pay and bonuses.

    Companies could also move further into embracing remote working if household energy bills are going to be better value than corporate energy bills. Companies could pay employees a sum to help with household energy bills, close their power-hungry offices and save money overall, benefiting from the energy price cap (plus gleaning all of the other benefits of 100% remote working).
  • Not sure that household energy bills are going to be any better value than corporate ones. More likely that people will return to offices so that they save on heating and lighting their own home throughout the day.
Reply Children