The Forgotten Workplace Wellbeing Pillar

That is the August most wellbeing programmes never see.

The Irish League of Credit Unions published its annual back to school survey on 14 July. It asked 752 parents, nationally representative by age, gender, region and socio-economic status, what the school year actually costs them. In 2026, parents of a primary school child expect to spend €1,607 across the year. Parents of a secondary school child, €2,142. Of that, €623 and €1,115 land upfront, in the few weeks either side of right now.

Fifty-nine per cent of parents call it a financial burden. More than one in four go into debt to cover it. Fewer are borrowing than last year, which sounds like progress until you look at the amount. The average debt has risen by €54, to €430. A gap is opening between the families who are managing and the families who are not.

The “From Pay to Peace of Mind” research from Irish organisation Employee Financial Wellbeing, published in April this year, also highlighted that financial pressure is now a wellbeing issue, not just a pay issue. The report found that 73% of research participants believe workplace-sponsored access to one-to-one financial education, guidance, digital tools and advice would help them make better financial decisions. It also highlighted that financial fragility increases anxiety, presenteeism, and fear-based decision-making at work.

This normally gets filed as a cost of living story. I think it's also a health story. And in September it walks into your building every morning and sits down at a desk.

What money worry does to a working brain

The most useful piece of research on this is over a decade old and still barely referenced in workplace wellbeing.

In 2013, Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao published ‘Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function’ in Science. They ran two studies. In the first, they asked people to think through a hypothetical car repair, then complete unrelated reasoning and spatial tasks. When the repair was cheap, everyone performed much the same. When it was expensive, lower income participants performed significantly worse. Nothing had changed except what they were carrying in their heads. In the second, they tested the same Indian sugarcane farmers before harvest, when money was tight, and after harvest, when it was not. The same person scored measurably worse when poor. The researchers described the size of the drop as comparable to losing a full night's sleep.

That is the finding that matters at work. Financial pressure is not a character flaw and it is not a budgeting problem. It is a bandwidth problem. It quietly consumes the same attention the organisation is paying for.

The CIPD's Good Work Index, based on a survey of 5,019 UK working adults in February 2025, puts numbers on it. Thirty-one per cent said money worries had negatively affected their work performance. Fifteen per cent said it had caused health problems such as stress. Thirteen per cent said it made it hard to concentrate or make decisions at work.

And here is the figure that ends the argument that this belongs to someone else. Among employees earning £60,000 a year or more, 22% said the same thing. Not a low pay issue.

It does not stop when they go home

Nineteen per cent of that same group said they had lost sleep worrying about money. That is where financial stress stops being an economic story and becomes a physiological one.

The evidence here has got a lot stronger recently. A 2025 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders used four waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, 34,156 people and more than 103,000 person-years, with fixed effects models that track change within the same individual over time. Financial strain predicted deteriorating mental health, and sleep problems both carried and amplified the effect. A separate 2025 study in the Journal of Business and Psychology followed full-time working adults across three time points, and found that financial strain predicted stress behaviours before bed, which predicted insomnia symptoms and sleep-related impairment months later.

Put those together and you get a loop that anyone who has been awake at 3am doing sums will recognise. Money worry costs you sleep. Lost sleep costs you judgement. Poor judgement costs you money. Round it goes.

The CIPD's own evidence review on financial wellbeing names the workplace consequences plainly. Absence, because people need time to sort the problem out or are too stressed to work. And presenteeism, because they turn up and are not really there.

Why this keeps getting missed

What follows is my view rather than a research finding, and I am flagging it as such. I have watched a lot of wellbeing programmes get built. Financial wellbeing is almost always the last pillar in.

Three reasons, I think.

It looks like somebody else's job. Physical health and mental health get the focus while financial wellbeing looks like payroll, or pensions, or the credit union, and so it drifts out of the wellbeing conversation altogether.

It gets confused with financial education. The standard offering is a provider running a lunchtime webinar, usually in November, usually attended by the people who already have savings. Useful, but it is not a strategy, and it is not aimed at the person deciding whether to put a school uniform on a credit card.

It is the one pillar where the employer is implicated. You can run a resilience workshop without saying anything uncomfortable about yourself as an employer. You cannot take financial wellbeing seriously for long before somebody asks what you pay.

What taking it seriously actually looks like

None of this needs a new provider or a new budget line.

Time the support to the pressure, not the calendar. Financial pressure in Ireland has a shape. August and September for school costs. December for Christmas. January for the bills that follow. Running the financial wellbeing session in November is putting the lifebuoy out after the swim.

Build a route out of a bad week. A hardship fund. Payroll saving, so people have a buffer before they need one. These are cheaper than the absence they prevent.

Train managers to hear it. A manager does not need to solve anyone's finances. They need to recognise that a sudden appetite for overtime can be a wellbeing signal rather than a motivation win, and know where to point.

For years we have measured wellbeing by what we provide. Step challenges, an app, fruit on a Tuesday, a speaker in October. Financial wellbeing does not fit that model, because you cannot provide your way out of it.

So it is not really the pillar HR or Health and Wellbeing forgot. It is the pillar they hoped somebody else would cover.

In three weeks the uniforms get bought, the ‘voluntary’ contribution gets paid, and everyone comes back and says the summer was grand. The question worth asking is whether anything in your organisation is set up to notice.

What I'm reading this month

In Praise of Walking: The new science of how we walk and why it's good for us. Picked this book up last weekend and just started reading it. I'll give my opinion on it next month.

This week I signed up for Catherine O'Keeffe's new Women's Health Weekly newsletter. The pace of change is accelerating in women's health around research, policy changes and workplace developments. This newsletter will keep you informed, and you can sign up here.

Excited to see more awareness of the need for manager training when it comes to understanding workplace wellbeing and psychological safety. Brian Crooke has launched his People Manager Wellbeing Training, with modules covering workplace wellbeing fundamentals, creating psychological safety, having effective wellbeing conversations, understanding workload and boundaries, building team wellbeing practices, and measuring impact and continuous improvement. More details here.

Stat of the month. Nearly half of employees (48%) say rising living costs have significantly or extremely increased their financial stress. (From Pay to Peace of Mind, Employee Financial Wellbeing, April 2026)