By Beth Pinsker
NEW YORK, March 7 (Reuters) - Everyone knows worrying about
money can make it harder to do your job. But recent research
suggests it is costing some employees more than two work weeks a
year in productivity.
That is more than just some morning fog before the second
cup of coffee kicks in. And it is a cause of what workplace
gurus call "presenteeism" - where you are at work but not fully
functioning due to illness or severe stress - which accounts for
more lost time than actual sick days, when people are fully
absent from their jobs.
Workers who say money concerns keep them from doing their
jobs lost 12.4 days due to presenteeism in 2015, and just 3.5
days to absence, according to a new study on financial worries
from Willis Towers Watson WLTW.O , a leading benefits firm.
"With a lot of desk jobs, you can fade away for a few hours,
but those hours have to be made up in some capacity. It starts
to compound," says Steve Nyce, a senior economist for Willis
Towers Watson, who led the study.
Figuring out the dollar cost of this lost productivity is
tricky, so most calculations are done by lost hours on the job,
says Debra Lerner, a professor at Tufts Medical Center in
Boston, who is one of the leading scholars on presenteeism.
Willis Towers Watson's study made use of the kind of
methodology that Lerner and her colleagues developed to measure
presenteeism, which is to ask workers about performance problems
during the previous two weeks, and then delve further into the
reasons for any lost focus.
Depression is always in the top five, Lerner says. Employees
with a major depressive episode will lose 15 percent to 20
percent of their productivity in a given year. Workers with more
mild forms of depression also experience productivity loss. And
while it is at a lower level, the periods of lost productivity
could last longer.
Stress can lead to a host of physical ailments, says Walter
'Buzz' Stewart, another pioneer in the study of presenteeism,
who is now a chief researcher for Sutter Health, a nonprofit
healthcare system based in Northern California.
"Every organ has at least one chronic episodic condition
-asthma, lower-back pain, migraine, depression or anxiety,"
Stewart says. "They come and go, and often their onset is
mediated by stress."
HELP IS OUT THERE
While some 85 percent of employers offer traditional options
to cope with stress through an Employee Assistance Program
(EAP), more are starting to offer specific financial management
help too, Nyce says.
The options range from financial planning seminars to help
with budgeting apps.
"There's a solution for everything out there," says Nyce.
Fidelity Investments just launched a new series of seminars
called Thrive, aimed at promoting financial literacy among
women. It is offering seminars at workplaces around the country.
Ron Goetzel, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University
and a vice-president at Truven Health Analytics, is also part of
a nonprofit group the Health Project (http://thehealthproject.com)
that awards prizes each year to companies with the best
wellness programs.
Both 2014 winners had special programs to help alleviate
financial stress. At energy company BP's BP.L U.S.
headquarters in Houston, employees receive one-on-one financial
coaching and 10 different classes to help with financial stress.
American Cast Iron Pipe Co, based in Birmingham, Alabama,
offers financial planning and debt avoidance counseling, among
its other offerings like smoking cessation programs.
Lowering stress among employees can be a good indicator of a
healthy business for investors. Goetzel recently tallied up the
performance of all the companies that have won awards since
2000. If a person had invested $10,000 in an index made up of
those companies, the rate of return would be 325 percent, versus
just 105 percent for the S&P 500 during the same time period, he
said.
(Editing by Lauren Young and Bill Rigby)