By Debbie Bailey
This year, Mental Health Awareness Week runs from 11 to 17 May 2026, and while conversations about workplace mental health have come a long way:
We talk about burnout, workload and culture, but there’s one driver of poor mental health at work that still gets avoided.
Money.
Mental health is complex, there isn’t one cause, it can be influenced by biology, life events, environment and more. The environment is where employers can make a real difference. The environment your employees walk into everyday matters, employees spend so much of their week at work. And one of the biggest pressures they carry with them? Financial stress.
Financial pressure sits in every workplace and rarely gets directly addressed. In the UK we still have a stigma around talking about money. People will joke about their sex life at work before they’ll mention they’re struggling financially.
The connection between financial stress and mental health is well documented. When people are worried about money, sleep suffers, concentration drops, and persistent financial anxiety can over time contribute to burnout and declining mental health. But it rarely gets named for what it is: financial stress. Instead, managers notice the employee who keep calling in sick with headaches, because they genuinely have them, from tension and broken sleep and weeks of worry. The one who seems distant in meetings, easily distracted, not quite themselves. The one suddenly asking for a pay rise, an advance on their salary, or volunteering for every overtime shift going. These are the signs. They’re easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
I’m a Financial Wellbeing Advisor and Chartered Management Accountant, not a mental health practitioner. What I can speak to is this one piece of the picture, what financial stress does inside organisations, what it costs, and what actually helps.
When I started my first job after university, someone suggested we all go out for curry after work. It seemed like a great idea, I’d moved away for the role and didn’t know anyone. But from the moment they suggested it, I was doing the maths in my head. The car had just broken down and needed repairing. I had no idea what the rules were. Did we split the bill? What if people ordered loads? What if they ordered alcohol? I was watching everything, trying to work out what to do, while everyone else just seemed to be enjoying themselves. I was there but I wasn’t really there.
That feeling? That’s what financial stress does at work. Every single day, for some of your people.
Financial stress doesn’t just affect someone’s bank balance. It gets into their sleep, their confidence, their ability to concentrate, and their sense of control. And none of that stays at home when they walk through your door. It can’t. We’re human.
If you’re a People Leader who is noticing these symptoms within your organisation and want to support employees to manage financial stress within the constraints of their salaries so that they can be more productive, effective and enjoy their role more, click here to book a call with me through my Directory listing.
What it looks like inside your organisation
Right now, in businesses across the UK, people are sitting in meetings, on warehouse floors, behind shop counters, carrying financial worry they haven’t told anyone about.
They won’t bring it up. Money is still one of the things people feel most ashamed to admit they’re struggling with. And for many, they completely disconnect from it, they become indifferent.
They turn up to everything they’re supposed to turn up to, getting through the day as best they can while carrying that weight around. The early signs are easy to miss, distraction, fatigue, reduced focus. Then it shows up in absence, mistakes, withdrawal, and eventually a resignation letter that feels like it came out of nowhere.
According to the CIPD Good Work Index 2025, a survey of 5,000 UK employees, 31% say money worries have negatively affected their work performance. Among employees earning under £40,000, that rises to 37%. And 19% have lost sleep because of it.
For sports and activewear businesses, where a significant proportion of your workforce sits in operational, fulfilment and retail roles, that’s not a small number. That’s a meaningful proportion of your team operating below their best, every single day.
And it’s worth saying, this isn’t just a lower earner problem. Around 1 in 8 UK employees are living in in-work poverty despite having a job. But employees earning £100,000 and above can feel just as financially stretched, mortgage renewals, lifestyle pressures, tax changes. Financial stress doesn’t respect salary bands.
What is it actually costing you?
According to the most recent research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, over 3.2 million private sector workers have taken time off due to poor financial wellbeing, resulting in 16 million working days lost across the UK annually. And that’s before you factor in presenteeism, the cost of employees who are physically present but mentally elsewhere.
To put that into context, for a business your size, if you have 100 employees earning an average of £35,000, and 12% take time off due to financial stress each year, losing around 4.7 days each, that’s roughly 56 working days lost annually to financial stress alone. At an average daily rate that’s over £7,500 in direct absence costs, before you factor in cover, the impact on the rest of the team, and the longer-term effect on productivity and morale.
59% of UK employees admit financial concerns prevent them from performing their best at work. That’s people in your meetings, on your shop floor, in your warehouse, not giving you everything they’re capable of while the pressure builds.
Then there’s employee turnover. Replacing an employee typically costs between a quarter and a third of their annual salary once you factor in recruitment, onboarding and the time it takes someone new to reach full productivity. Financial stress is consistently one of the reasons good people leave, they don’t dislike the job, but a small pay rise somewhere else feels like the answer. They don’t know how else to fix it.
And there’s one more cost that often gets overlooked. You’re likely already paying for benefits your employees aren’t using, health cover, pension contributions, share schemes. Employees who feel financially overwhelmed don’t engage with these. They mean to. But it never quite makes it to the top of the list. They simply switch off, disconnect and only when something major happens, a life change, like having a baby, do they start to engage. That’s a return on investment you’re funding but not seeing.
But this goes beyond money.
It’s about how people feel when they wake up in the morning, how they sleep at night, and how much of that pressure they carry into work with them.
If you’re responsible for people, wellbeing or performance, it’s worth understanding how this is already showing up in your organisation. You can find more about how I support businesses here.
What helps and what doesn’t
More money landing in someone’s account each month doesn’t change how they think or feel about it. I’ve seen this consistently, highly capable people managing multi-million pound budgets professionally, struggling privately with their own. We are not talking about intelligence or income. We are talking about confidence, behaviour and having the right tools.
What works is structured, behaviour-led support. Not a resource hub that nobody clicks on. Not a link to a money comparison website. Not a one-hour session that feels useful on the day and changes nothing by Monday. Or feels like a massive in-convenience.
65% of employees say it’s important that a future employer has a policy to support financial wellbeing when looking for their next job. The people you’re trying to attract and keep already expect this. What’s missing isn’t the intention, it’s knowing where to start.
When employees have the knowledge, tools and confidence to feel in control of their money, you see the difference. Fewer stress-related absences. Less presenteeism. Fewer of those uncomfortable conversations about pay rises driven by panic rather than performance. Better engagement with the benefits you already offer. And staff who choose to stay because they actually feel looked after, not just paid.
This isn’t about teaching people to budget better but about helping them feel in control of their money for the first time.
In a typical session with me, employees might cover:
- Understanding where their money is going each month
- Simple systems to separate tax, bills and spending so nothing feels like a surprise
- Clear guidance on how to make decisions around pay, debt and savings without overwhelm
- Understanding why they avoid their finances in the first place
- Breaking the cycle of “I know what to do, but I’m not doing it”
- Building simple habits that make feeling in control the norm, not the exception
Straightforward, practical and designed to get used.
A question worth asking
Mental Health Awareness Week exists to encourage honest conversations. So, here’s one worth having internally.
Do you know how many of your employees are carrying financial stress right now? Not a guess, actually know?
Most organisations don’t. And that’s not a criticism, it’s genuinely hard to see. People are good at hiding it. But the cost of not knowing is already sitting on your payroll.
What working with me looks like
I’m a Chartered Management Accountant and Certified Financial Coach, and I work with HR, people and finance teams in sports, fitness and activewear brands to design and deliver financial wellbeing programmes that make a genuine difference.
That ranges from one-off keynote sessions and Lunch and Learns, to interactive workshops, group coaching and seasonal campaigns built around your wellbeing calendar. Stress awareness month, debt awareness week, the run-up to Christmas when financial pressure peaks for so many people.
Everything is practical, jargon-free and tailored to your workforce.
One recent employer said: “The attendees had never really encountered the money mindset before, but Debbie made the idea accessible. The session was brilliantly interactive and powerful.”
If you’re seeing signs of financial stress in your team, whether that’s absence, disengagement or pressure around pay, the starting point is a conversation.
You can find more about my work and get in touch here.
