Yahoo Finance Workers' mental health issues cost UK businesses up to £51bn a year
About 40% of workers in Britain have financial worries which, in turn, has impacted their mental health and their work performance. This has resulted in costing British businesses an estimated £39-51bn ($51-67bn) annually.
That’s according to a new study commissioned by Salary Finance and conducted by market research group Clusters, which surveyed 10,053 people across 25 sectors in public and private companies. The responses were weighted to be representative of all UK workers (aged 18+) and statistically meaningful for each of the sectors, geographic regions and by salary band.
It found that the employees that had financial worries, were nearly eight times less likely to finish their daily tasks, and almost six times more likely to report troubled relationships with coworkers. The survey showed 73% of workers with financial worries said they were stressed while 46% said they were depressed, compared with 21% and 9% among those with no financial worries.
From the results, Salary Finance calculated that this costs businesses the equivalent of 2.4% of UK GDP. “This is greater than the budget for defence and more than half the education budget,” it said. It looked at the total payroll for those in full-time and part-time employment and how much it would impact businesses from the proportion of those who say they have mental health concerns and that they struggled to do their duties at work.
READ MORE: UK firms least likely in EMEA to have a defined plan to look after staff health
“This research shows that personal money worries are having a real impact on employee wellbeing and performance, as well as business productivity. However, it also indicates that higher levels of financial literacy and access to responsible finance have the potential to improve the situation,” said Asesh Sarkar, CEO and co-founder of Salary Finance, in a statement sent to Yahoo Finance UK.
“In this groundbreaking study, we have developed a Financial Fitness Score which is a quantifiable objective measure, and can act as a KPI. CEOs and HR professionals can use this to benchmark how they are performing versus their peer group. More importantly, this study identifies what employers can do to improve their fitness score KPI and reduce the cost of ‘financial unwellbeing’ in their business.”
The results are in line with those found in a review by the UK government in 2017, which showed that about 300,000 people with long-term mental health problems lose their jobs each year, costing the UK economy up to £99bn — of which employers bear the financial burden of £42bn.
