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Can Same Day Pay Reduce Employee Stress in Aftermath of Covid-19?

Tapcheck Team • November 13, 2020

Retaining Employees in a New Environment

It must be said that the companies that survived the economic shutdown instigated by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic deserve many accolades. Week after week brought new reports of businesses of every sort permanently or temporarily shutting down operations. Now, as the strictures of the pandemic are easing and companies are doing their best to get back to pre-pandemic operating levels, new challenges are emerging.

One of the more difficult issues facing employers is hanging on to the excellent workers they brought in to help build the success of the company. The uncertainties and financial hardships brought on by the pandemic caused emotional and economic ripples throughout the workforce and their families. For some employees it brought about uncertainty, particularly when it comes to job security and financial well-being.

This has left businesses looking for new solutions and benefits that may be available to improve their employees lives both in and out of work.

This article will discuss some of the sources of employee anxiety and list several strategies employers can use to connect with their workers. It will also explore an emerging financial perk employers are beginning to offer employees that greatly diminishes employees financial anxiety while costing the company nothing.

What Stresses Out Employees?

Under the best of circumstances, employees may experience anxiety for any number of reasons. Unfortunately, the pandemic has brought a lot of stress into households from a variety of different directions. The unavoidable, unpredictable economic slowdown instigated by the Covid-19 pandemic created havoc for businesses on a global scale and also resulted in a lot of heartache for individual workers. Continual, pervasive uncertainty was the hallmark of of every workplace throughout the year. The resumption of work, to the extent work did resume, did little to calm the worries of American workers.

As they return to work, there are number of other factors that continue to to stress out employees. Here is a list of the most frequently voiced issues that come between employees and the companies for which they work:

Lack of upward mobility - Gone are the days when a factory worker might feel content turning bolts on the same conveyor belt for 40 years. As technology, workplace innovation, and changing norms spark evolutions in every industry, workers desire the opportunity to acquire new, more significant skill set.
Toxic work environment - Given that workers spend as many work week hours with their co-workers as they do with their familes, they desire to have work environments that are comfortable. Their leaders and environment can make the job site a place of great enthusiasm or pervasive misery.
Poor Administrative Leadership - If a business is a ship, the sailors want the captain and officers to head out to sea and engage in some interesting cruises. The crew seems to get discouraged and apathetic however when they come to accept that the ship is just going to stay tied to the dock.
Lack of Company Loyalty to Employees - This concern precedes the pandemic layoffs by several decades. Employees want to sense that the company recognizes their value.
Inadequate Compensation - This goes beyond the notion of simply being underpaid. Compensation implies not only a salary but also a range of benefits that can contribute to an employees health, future retirement, programs to achieve a work life balance, and even recognition for a successful job well done. This could include Group Health Insurance, 401k Plans, and Paid Time off policies among other benefits.

How Employers Can Promote Employee Loyalty

There are a great many opinions about how a company can promote loyalty within its workforce. Before focusing on the specefics however, it's worth noting that virtually every solution emphasized by researchers and experts has at its core the notion that management should be engaged with workers. This is to say that the best and most creative ideas for promoting corporate enthusiasm among a company's workers will not succeed if the employers are not regularly interacting with the employees. Here is a compilation of some of the best ideas for promoting a positive and team focused culture in the workplace:

Demonstrate esteem for all employees - The idea behind getting rid of office walls originally had less to do with cost-cutting and increased productivity than it had to with a form of workplace equality. When employees are treated iwth honest and deference they tend to return the same.
Establish a desired corporate culture- If upper management maintains a postive attitude of integrity it will pervade the entire business. Also, never underestimate the power of establishing written policies about behaviour that includes an emphasis on mutual respect.
Empower your leaders - More than anything leaders need to feel comfortable with transparency. Employees want to be able to know why they and the company are making the decisions that they are.
Insist on enhanced training and continuing education- If employees are encouraged to build build upon their knowledge and abilities it will not only demosntrate to them that they are valued, but also will ensure that they are able to keep up in the rapidly evolving business world.
Defined policies for dispute resolution - This idea extends to all personnel matters. Create and continually update your employee handbook and follow it assiduously in all pertinent matters. Employees evaulate the degree of fairness they receive based upon the degree to which the rules were applied equally to all.

New Tool Eases Employee's Financial Concerns

Having discussed the reasons workers experience greater than normal stress these days and having explored those things they most want in a workplace, there is a new tool that employers are turning to in an effort to relieve their employees from some of the financial stresses they frequently encounter - On Demand Pay.

This boils down quite simply to an app employees can download on a smartphone that allows them to draw an immediate advance on their regular pay. Several important principls about this should be stressed:

The money they are receiving is money they already earned that they would otherwise receive in their paycheck
This process does not in any way interefere with the company payroll methods. It is simply a way of shortening the time period between an employee earning and being paid for it.
The funds drawn by the employee automatically come out of the employee's next check.
It doesn't cost the company anything to participate in this program. The employees pay a small, flat fee anytime they wish to use on-demand earnings this way.

The movement for providing on-demand pay as a convenience for employees is quite new but is rapidly gaining steam. The benefits for employees are obvious as on-demand earnings will remove incentives for employees to raid their savings or turn to high cost options such as payday lenders. On-demand pay provides employees with access to their cash when they need it the most all from the convenience of their smart phones or tablets.

Beyond the benefits for employees, there are also distinct benefits to employers as well.

Researchers have theorized that this new program will increase productivity and cut down absences, in part because it greatly diminishes the financial stress placed on employees. It's helpful to businesses in recruiting because not all companies offer this to their workers yet. It has been shown to take the feeling of crisis out of critical situations because employees know where they can turn for emergency funding without pleading with the boss for help. All of these factors reveal that this on-demand pay program provides a real boon to employee retention.

Investigating and Identifying Options for On-Demand Pay

Before employees can download an on-demand payroll app, they must have the permission of their employer. This means it is incumbent upon you to investigate this new way of distributing on-demand earnings.

It is always important to investigate different options that may be available to you to understand which provider may be the best fit for your group. While there are providers for larger companies like DailyPay and smaller companies like ZayZoon, we feel that Tapcheck has an offering that fits well from startups to enterprise sized companies.

You will want to consider costs to employees, the employer, how funds can be accessed, how frequently they can be accessed, and whether or not the risk is placed on the provider or the employer for advanced funds.

Regardless of which option is best for you, your employees will be grateful for the option as this new employee benefit gains more momentum over the years to come.