Outstanding student debt is at $1.4 trillion—an all-time high. And average household credit card debt is approximately $5,000, with the median debt at more than $16,000, according to Nasdaq.
Because debt is so paralyzing for so many Americans, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) dubbed 2017 the Year of Employee Financial Wellness Programs, predicting employers would need to start doing what they could to help their workers manage their finances. In its 2016 Employee Benefits survey report, SHRM found that 61% of HR professionals described their employees' financial health as no better than "fair," and 17% reported their employees were "not at all financially literate."
Isolating a need in its operation, Harvard Dining Services partnered with Working Credit NFP, a not-for-profit credit-building company based in Chicago. The program was so successful that Susan Simon, senior HR consultant for dining services at the Cambridge, Mass., university, gets requests from other university departments to expand the program. "We're talking now about bringing it to the rest of Harvard," she says. "People are asking me: 'Can you get me in?'"
Click through for three ways operators can help their employees with financial wellness.