Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. You might recognise that line from the classic – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s relevant here for two reasons.
Firstly because we’re taking our own moment to stop and reflect on what’s been an incredibly busy few weeks for Hastee. Namely because we launched the 2019 edition of our Workplace Wellbeing Study which takes a deep dive into the UK’s reliance on high-cost credit and explores the impact on workers.
Secondly, this very study reveals that 39% of UK workers have taken an impromptu day off, just like Ferris. However, that’s where the similarities begin and end, as the narrative here is far darker.
Workers are being forced to take a day out because some form of money has restricted them from getting to work. It’s a shocking state of affairs, but hardly surprising when you weigh up some of the other findings from our research which has been published in The London Evening Standard, Wired and Gizmodo among other titles.
Between hosting our research roundtable (hosted by the Money Magpie herself Jasmine Birtles and featuring Nick Agwuncha of Money Medics, CIPD’s Charles Cotton, Paul Litchfield CBE of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing and Sam Fuller of the Wellbeing Project as panellists), meeting with journalists from national papers and exploring the research findings in features for HR and trade press, the continued discussion of the research findings has really hit home.
With 82% of workers source funds from high cost credit options between pay days, 38% applying for high cost credit options despite knowing they would struggle to keep up with repayments and 56% of millennials saying the recent rise in buy-now-pay-later schemes encourages them to spend money they don’t have, the need for financial wellbeing has never been greater. We were well aware of the issues people are facing when we first started our mission, but this second instalment of our annual research reaffirms our belief that workers need on-demand access to their earnings.
So now, with even more determination, we’re rolling our sleeves up even higher to continue our mission to bring financial wellbeing to the working masses. They’ve earned it.
If you’re a worker who understands the struggle all too well, or you’re an employer who is just beginning to learn about the impact of financial stress on your workforce (not to mention the negative business impacts), then speak to us today to understand more about how Hastee can help change the narrative.
