Most everyone knows what wellness programs are designed to do for the body — help you get and stay more physically fit and be more proactive for your personal health. But what about your company and your employees' financial well-being? Do your employees suffer from the financial flu?

A new survey from Consumer Affairs says money worries have become a significant distraction for employees during working hours. Not Facebook, not chain emails, not weight loss — worries about money. Although many U.S. businesses have recovered from the Great Recession, many of the people who work at those businesses haven't. The Society for Human Resource Management says those worries are now a huge drain on employee productivity. Here's what the 2014 SHRM survey Financial Wellness in the Workplace found:

  • Seven out of 10 human resource professionals said that personal financial challenges have a large or some impact on their employees' performance.
  • More than 40 percent said that difficulty in covering personal expenses is having a workplace impact on employees.
  • Almost 40 percent of employees are facing greater personal financial challenges now compared with the onset of the recession in 2007.
  • Nearly 25 percent of human resources professionals said employees are experiencing more personal financial challenges now compared with 12 months ago.

Read: Employees struggle with financial health

And that's just the HR professionals who are attuned to the financial difficulty their employees face. Others could be clueless. The survey also uncovered this alarming fact: employees were 60 percent more likely to tap their retirement account for a loan than in previous years, and 44 percent are more likely to ask for a hardship withdrawal from retirement savings.

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In today's economy, many of your employees are experiencing financial distress. Employee financial distress costs employers:

Even in a good economy, individual financial wellness is important. For employers, the well-being of employees is a critical component to success. Today, the financial distress employees experience is yet one more way a bad economy impacts your business. When workplace outcomes can be improved, everyone benefits. The benefits to employers are definitely worthwhile, leading to the following positive results:

  • Enhanced productivity
  • Decreased absenteeism
  • Improved employee health and preventative care/lower health care costs
  • Increased pay satisfaction
  • Utilized benefits

Typically, financial wellness programs offer an array of proactive financial planning tools that help you better manage your money in the short term (through budgeting, credit counseling and the like) and in the long term (retirement planning). Even if offered as an employer benefit, employees should weigh these three factors: the services offered, confidentiality, and their ingrained financial habits.

Establishing and maintaining healthy spending and saving habits is as important to your employees' well being as proper nutrition and regular exercise. You can achieve financial wellness — the balance between living responsibly today and planning wisely for tomorrow.  According to Waddell & Reed, financial wellness isn't about money; it's about decision-making. A good financial wellness program should include these initiatives:

  • Help your employees build awareness of their financial situation
  • Provide your employees education for establishing financial goals
  • Empower your employees to change their behavior and achieve their goals through informed choices in the financial planning process

For many companies, employee financial wellness is the missing piece to maximizing the effectiveness of existing wellness programs and fully containing health care costs — not to mention fostering a workforce of healthier, happier and more productive employees who are engaged and empowered.

There are several very good financial wellness programs in the market that cater to employers. Some of them include telephone counseling, and others have web-based programs. You may want to consider a more broad-based approach by offering a menu of items including these and other services, such as an EAP product, ID theft protection, tax and legal services, financial advice, and more.

You can get these services from individual vendors or from a product aggregator. For example, Careington International has a financial wellness package that includes all of these types of products and can be installed on a voluntary or non-voluntary platform.

When your employees get sick, they go home or go to the doctor. If they are struggling physically, you usually have some procedures in place to assist them. But if your staff is struggling financially, you may not know until it's too late. Typically, people don't wear their financial problems on their sleeve and can be pretty adept at hiding fiscal difficulties, at least for a while.

As a manager, business owner or employer, you should be aware of the telltale signs of financial stress and what you can do to help resolve them in a timely manner. Keep your employees from catching the financial flu.

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