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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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  • We recently ran 2 Financial Wellbeing workshops with a really good uptake across the whole business. I've followed these up with publishing a Financial Wellbeing policy, which signposts employees to internal and external support. It also sets out the company's view that this topic is something worth talking about, whether with line managers, colleagues, HR, our EAP or our MHFA. And we are running 1-1s this week for employees to speak with an independent financial adviser on any topics of their choice, e.g. mortgages, savings, debt, etc.
    All of this is intended to show employees that the business is aware of current and anticipated economic problems and acknowledges the role it plays in helping employees deal with it.
    Now my plan is to get feedback from line managers, to share with my Board, to inform our annual pay review, due in January, and any other action we think necessary in the interim.
    However, as others have said, I think we shall need to hold off making or communicating any decisions until we know our government's plans for tackling rising energy prices and inflation. Hopefully this will be very soon.
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  • We recently ran 2 Financial Wellbeing workshops with a really good uptake across the whole business. I've followed these up with publishing a Financial Wellbeing policy, which signposts employees to internal and external support. It also sets out the company's view that this topic is something worth talking about, whether with line managers, colleagues, HR, our EAP or our MHFA. And we are running 1-1s this week for employees to speak with an independent financial adviser on any topics of their choice, e.g. mortgages, savings, debt, etc.
    All of this is intended to show employees that the business is aware of current and anticipated economic problems and acknowledges the role it plays in helping employees deal with it.
    Now my plan is to get feedback from line managers, to share with my Board, to inform our annual pay review, due in January, and any other action we think necessary in the interim.
    However, as others have said, I think we shall need to hold off making or communicating any decisions until we know our government's plans for tackling rising energy prices and inflation. Hopefully this will be very soon.
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