Mel Abraham says employees lose two to three hours weekly to financial stress, creating what he calls decision noise that makes them play it safe at work. Better financial literacy, not just higher pay, reduces this mental load and frees them to perform at full capacity.
There is data out there that shows 2 to 3 hours a week is spent on personal finance or financial stress by each employee a week. So mathematically, you can figure out what that does to the bottom line. And what does it do? It creates an emotional load on your employees, on your teams. That emotional load creates a, a decision noise is what I call it. That decision noise makes it that they don't make the proper decisions all the time cuz they're distracted. They make decisions from a place of, hey, I need this job, so I'm gonna make the right, the decision to keep the job versus the bold, courageous decision to thrive, to do the things that maybe we should be doing in the job. So what happens, and I call it a bandwidth issue, is that they're not operating at their fullest potential because, not because they can't, not because they don't have skills, because they don't have the bandwidth. They don't have the mind space To be able to do it. And if we just give them— it's not about giving them more money, it's giving them better understanding. We give them that understanding, relieve the stress, emotional load goes down, decision noise goes down. All of a sudden, less PTO, more productivity, more focus. It's a whole different game.
