By Debbie Bailey
An FD told me recently that her organisation already has financial education covered. The finance team handles it. By sharing budgeting information, explaining the basics, and answering some questions. Job done.
What she didn’t mention, and what I already knew from working with finance people is that many personally find managing their own finances a real struggle. Being good at your job and managing organisational finances are very different to managing personal finances, where emotions and behavioural psychology come into play.
And this difference is so important.
The finance team can share knowledge. They can explain what a pension is, how a budget works, what auto-enrolment means. What they cannot do is address the behavioural psychology underneath why people don’t act on that knowledge. The stories employees tell themselves about money. The shame that stops someone opening a pension statement. The nervous system response that makes a financial decision feel overwhelming even when the information is right there.
And there’s something else. Finance teams have enough on their plates. They are responsible for the profit and loss, cash flow, reporting, forecasting, the work the organisation depends on. Asking them to also deliver financial wellbeing support pulls them away from that, and into territory they were never trained for. The organisation is not getting the best from them, or from the people they are trying to help.
Organisations put real thought into developing their people. Leadership development, skills training, technical capability, all of it has structure. Budgets are set, courses are provided, it sits inside personal development conversations and reviews.
But this approach stops when it comes to learning about money and financial confidence.
Financial education and wellbeing get pushed into a different category, filed under benefits, wellbeing, or HR, separate from how the business develops its people. Based on an assumption that financial confidence doesn’t impact performance.
Some organisations believe financial wellbeing is just a personal issue, with no upside for the business and this is why it is kept separately under employee benefits. But it does. It shows up in lower focus, quieter voices in meetings and people switching off earlier than they used to.
And right now, in 2026, the cost is higher than ever.
Your organisation’s employees are carrying more than they realise
Financial pressure is back at near-pandemic levels. According to the Nudge Global Financial Wellbeing Report 2025, only 29% of employees globally said they felt hopeful about their financial situation, down from 60% the year before.
In the UK, that pressure is very practical: food costs, energy bills, housing and general global uncertainty about what’s coming next. Employees bring all these worries into the workplace, it comes into meetings, on the shop floor, into customer conversations and decision-making. It affects how much headspace people have before they even start their day.
This distraction, tiredness and stress can cause health and safety issues, sway the way negotiations go (not necessarily consciously) and change discussions in board meetings.
The bombardment of negative news stories, the letters from mortgage providers and landlords, the political tensions in the UK and abroad, with no idea when it will end. This pressure piles up.
Financial health is now rated lower than physical, mental, and social health, with only 49% of people rating it as good or excellent globally. And yet it is the one area where most employers offer the least structured support.
The employees who are struggling are not always the ones you expect. Financial stress does not stop because someone is on a higher pay grade. It impacts your entire workforce, often hidden, often managed alone, and almost always affecting performance, employers and leaders just cannot see it straight away.
If you are thinking about how to reach employees who are struggling but not saying so, I would love to have that conversation. You can find me and get in touch here.
The problem isn’t always who you think it is
When organisations do think about financial wellbeing, they tend to picture a specific employee who is visibly struggling, someone who needs help right now and is maybe asking for support.
But the data tells a more complicated story, one where employees are indifferent, not panicking but certainly not engaging or making proactive decisions for their financial situation now or in the future.
They are avoiding looking at their pension because it doesn’t really cross their mind, they have completely switched off from it. Some assume and hope that auto-enrolment will sort it all, when we know that isn’t the case. It just doesn’t feel urgent enough to deal with today. They are not overspending out of recklessness. They are simply not making active decisions at all.
From the outside, they look fine, but they are not really. Employees who are disengaged from their finances are less likely to use the benefits you are already funding, less likely to build any savings buffer, and less likely to be financially resilient when a life event hits; a baby, a house move, a bereavement, a parent needing support. Then suddenly they are trying to make financial decisions from a standing start, with no real knowledge or confidence in making those decisions. By then it feels harder, heavier and more emotional than it needed to. And that means they are more stressed, sleeping less and this results in an employee who is distracted, looking at job adverts, scrolling mortgage deals at work and not fully engaged.
The employees who need financial education, wellbeing and confidence are the ones who sit indifferently with no real reason to get started, that is until the “moment in time” hits and makes them pay attention. But do they have the resources available to make those decisions?
These are not separate from your people strategy. They affect engagement, performance and retention directly.
Learning at Work Week is a useful prompt
Every May, Learning at Work Week encourages organisations to think intentionally about the skills their people need, one to do their jobs better and two to function well in their lives. What skills are missing? What gaps are getting in their way? What development would genuinely help?
Financial skills almost never make that list. And yet financial literacy is declining as a trend, not just a gap in individual knowledge, but something we’re seeing across the UK. Most people were never taught this properly: not at school, not at home, not anywhere. The gap between knowing you should engage with your pension/finances/savings and understanding how to is a learning problem and a nervous system one.
The research is clear on what changes when that learning happens. People with good or excellent financial literacy are 9% less stressed and 9% less anxious than those with poor literacy. They are nearly five times more likely to feel confident navigating economic change.
That matters because organisations need people who can think clearly, engage with what is on offer and make decisions before problems become crises, which is a people strategy issue.
If you want to explore what behaviour-led financial learning could look like for your workforce, you can reach me here.
What it means to take this seriously as an employer
The evidence on employer-provided financial education is compelling. Employees with access to it are more optimistic about their future. They rate their health higher across physical, mental, social, and financial wellbeing. And 36% say their relationship with their employer goes beyond purely transactional. This is a retention tool and therefore should form part of an organisation’s people strategy.
Trust, loyalty and how valued people feel, doesn’t just come down to pay, it also comes from whether an organisation makes an employee feel valued which includes treating financial learning as something worth investing in.
When financial learning is genuinely embedded, not a one-off webinar, not a portal nobody visits, but structured, timely, behaviour-led support, a few things shift. Benefits that were being ignored become used. Pension schemes, share plans, health cover: often ignored not because employees don’t want them, but because nobody helped them understand how they work or why they matter. Engagement improves when people have the confidence to act, which means better return on what you are already spending.
Financial stress reduces because the organisation has given people the tools to start addressing it. It does not disappear overnight, but people are better equipped to deal with it. And when that happens, the conversation around money becomes less shameful and less reactive. That is where this ties back to people strategy.
Because this is not just about wellbeing. It is about whether your people have the capability to perform as well as they can, whether they stay (and you continue to reap the investments you made into them), and whether the support you are already paying for actually gets used.
The question worth asking
If your organisation ran a skills audit tomorrow, a genuine look at the gaps affecting your people’s performance and wellbeing, financial capability would almost certainly appear near the top.
The question is whether you treat it the same way you treat any other development need: with structure, with timing, and with the expectation that learning, done well, actually changes things.
The organisations that do are building a workforce that is more resilient, more engaged, and better able to use what is already on offer and seeing that reflected in the numbers that matter.
What this looks like in practice
I work with HR and People teams to make financial wellbeing a practical part of how they support and develop their workforce. That might be workshops, group sessions, talks or something more joined-up over time. But it always starts from the same place: what is actually getting in the way of your people engaging with their finances, and what would genuinely help them move?
That question sounds simple. But most organisations have never really asked it. They have rolled out a portal, pointed people at a webinar, ticked the box and moved on and nothing changed.
The employees who need this most are not going to self-select into a lunchtime seminar on ISAs. They are the ones looking fine, carrying it alone and not saying much. The ones who will only engage when the support is well-timed, relevant and doesn’t feel like homework.
If you are seeing signs of financial pressure in your workforce, disengagement, ongoing pay conversations, people who seem distracted, it is worth looking at what is sitting underneath that.
If behaviour-led financial learning is something you want to explore for your workforce, get in touch here.
