Stress Counseling

By Roger Travis
Founder of ExperienceLab Inc.

Employees report a sharp increase in financial-related stress in recent years, with a significant impact on their employers.

The Facts

According to PwC, the percentage of employees who find it stressful dealing with their finances soared to 67% in 2019 from 47% in 2018. Thirty-two percent of employees say financial worries are negatively impacting their health. Twenty-one percent say it’s impacting their productivity, and 10% their attendance at work.

PwC calculated that financial stress likely costs an employer with a workforce of 10,000 more than $3 million per year in lost productivity.

Ubiquitous

Stress is ubiquitous…a costly problem for employers and, because anxious employees are unlikely to share their distress with their HR rep, a very difficult problem to address.

Employers need tools to predict which employees are likely to need financial stress counseling; this would enable employers to initiate a dialog with employees who need it the most. Employers also need to predict employee response to such outreach and personalize content accordingly.

Which groups should a program target?

The following charts show responses from ExperienceLab’s nationwide employee sample to survey questions about health and financial stress. Taken as a whole, the population shows widely varying attitudes toward stress. However, when segmented into Persona’s^tm seven proprietary segments, the pattern of responses to the multiple relevant questions confirm a predictable pattern among segments in their reaction to health and financial stress.

Each of the three charts below graphs the responses to one of 250 questions asked by ExperienceLab to 10,000 workers. More than 25 of these questions specifically probe causes and outcomes of employee stress.

In each chart, individual bars represent responses from each of Persona’s^tm 7 attitudinal segments.  Looking at these charts, it is striking how similar the pattern of responses is. The implication is that the ExperienceLab segments successfully group the respondents so that responses would be predictive of behavior in a larger sample.

All the charts indicate that some segments of employees are significantly more concerned with stress than others. Taken together, the charts strongly suggest that employees in Segments 1 and 7 have the most acute and concrete need for help with stress. Using responses from other related survey questions will indicate which of the two segments would be best addressed first and with what messages.

Insights available for your business

These insights and others related to stress counseling are available for your internal use to analyze your employees’ needs. ExperienceLab has developed a unique list that includes all U.S. employees, each identified with one of the seven research-based attitudinal segments.

ExperienceLab can provide you with that list for just your employees so you can select the individuals most likely to welcome communications and move toward engaging them in appropriate counseling.  

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