Promoting Staff Financial Well-Being in Human Service Organizations: The Role of Pay, Benefits, and Working Conditions

ABSTRACT

Many U.S. workers struggle with financial challenges. Human service organizations (HSOs) can consider ways to better promote financial well-being among staff, especially lower-wage, frontline workers. In addition to raising pay, HSOs can improve benefits and working conditions in ways that will meaningfully affect staff's financial well-being, such as offering wage-tiered health insurance premiums, financial counseling, access to public benefits, and giving staff more control over their schedules. Doing so will help HSOs strengthen their commitments to social and economic justice, yet financial challenges among nonprofit HSOs – especially those that are minority-led and/or -serving – require changes in public policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Employer benefits
• financial capability
• financial security
• financial well-being
• low-wage workers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Wages and benefits are tracked differently by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While wage information is available for specific occupational categories like Social and Human Service Assistant, benefits information is only available by industry and by certain worker characteristics like wage group.

² There were 399,560 jobs in 2022 in this occupational category, which requires a High School diploma or equivalent and is expected to grow by 12% from 2021 to 2031 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023).

³ Abbott Labs is the first company to offer this arrangement after receiving a favorable ruling from the Internal Revenue Service.

⁴ See https://nationalfund.org/our-resources/publications/guide-to-employee-financial-wellness/ and https://justcapital.com/reports/new-guide-shows-how-companies-can-prioritize-employee-experience/.