COMP NEWS – A new survey indicates that employees are looking for a powerful job benefit that few people are offering – emergency savings accounts.
Concerns about high inflation and a possible recession have not only affected the financial lives of many American workers — they’re also now changing the type of workplace perks that employees say they’d value most.
Some employers are taking notice and expanding their offerings.
Employees report that building savings for an emergency and paying monthly bills are just as stressful as — if not more stressful than — saving enough for retirement, according to the 2023 Workplace Wellness Survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
This is the first time in four years of the EBRI survey that saving for retirement is not the primary financial stress factor for employees.
About two in five employees signal they want an emergency savings account through their employer, despite only 10% of employers offering these benefits in 2022.
About 42% of employees want to be automatically enrolled in an emergency savings account through their employer, according to research from the Bipartisan Policy Center. However, just 10% of employers offered these benefits in 2022, according to human resources consulting firm Buck.
Yet those numbers may increase as employers recognize the upsides for the worker and the workplace.
“When you do need that money for an emergency, you’re not taking a withdrawal from your 401(k) plan, you’re not missing a student loan payment, you’re not getting evicted, you’re not having your water shut off, so that you can actually come to work without having to worry about all of that,” said Chantel Sheaks, vice president of retirement policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
For more Comp News, see our recent posts.
Comp News is brought to you by CompXL, the flexible compensation software provider that enables mid- to large-size organizations to implement competitive pay structures such as vested stock options and variable incentive pay.
