Time is Money

Time is money.

These three words form the unseen spine of every business, and UKG Wallet can help with both.

Time is a fixed asset for employers. You want to “make the most of your time,” “not waste time,” and “be productive with your time.”  Employers and markets welcome anything that “saves time” or makes “more efficient use of time.”

Time converts to product via work.  Product converts to money via sales.  

The monetary value of time thus depends upon an employer’s ability to optimize its use. During the Industrial Revolution, individual workers were pooled into teams to work in factories. Instead of one person creating one hour’s worth of product, now hundreds of people created hundreds of hours worth of product, but in just one hour.

People working together enhanced productivity because efficiencies were created.

Then came the question of how to further enhance each worker’s productivity.

Modern benefit programs are designed to incentivize workers to drive recruiting or employee retention.  Yet these benefit programs overlook an internal problem that offsets the gains of these same benefit programs.

That internal problem is productivity leakage.

This leakage occurs because of financial stress, or financial un-wellness.  In PwC’s 2019 Survey of Employee Financial Wellness, 30% of workers reported spending 3+ hours per week at work dealing with financial stress brought on by the liquidity crunch created by biweekly payroll.

That translates to a productivity loss of roughly $2,600 per stressed employee, per year.  For a company with 10,000 employees, some 3,000 are stressed, leading to a whopping $8.7 million in productivity leakage. That isn’t a leak. It’s more like a flood.

How can you halt that flood?

Use UKG Wallet, powered by PayActiv, a leading employer-sponsored earned wage access and financial wellness platform.  

PayActiv lets workers access their earned wages at any time during a pay period. A worker can receive a direct deposit onto The PayActiv Card or load money into any account of their choice, at any time they choose.

PayActiv is fully integrated with UKG Wallet, so setup can be accomplished in as little as 48 hours, at no cost to the employer — either during setup or thereafter.

How Does Earned Wage Access Increase Productivity? 

Earned wage access takes hours worked and immediately converts that time into money.  

It enables employers to let workers live the lives they’ve earned every day, instead of having to wait two weeks at a time.  Workers can fully participate in the economy they helped create, instead of being beholden to the batch payroll system. It enables workers to navigate the ups, downs, and unknowns of life because they have choice, flexibility, and freedom.

This is more than empowering to the hourly worker. It is transformative.

Stress only does one thing. It consumes. It consumes energy, psychological space, physical health, and time. It does this by removing a person’s productivity at home: being present and aware for spouses and children; distracting a person from activities they might enjoy or that are important, such as, reading, learning a new skill, or exercise — which can result in a person eating unhealthy fast food instead of making healthy home-cooked meals. 

On a worker’s personal balance sheet, time was a restricted asset, offset by the liability of financial stress. They were working with negative personal equity. It’s like playing “Chutes and Ladders,” except there are only chutes and no ladders.

Earned wage access allows the asset of time to be freed.

Time to be with family. Time to play with the kids. Time to exercise. Time to eat right. Time to relax. Time to learn a new skill. Time to read. And most importantly, time to dream.

All humans dream of a better life. It is our natural state to self-transcend. No matter how good we may have it, we always strive to find something grander for ourselves, and often times, for others.

When workers have time to pursue their dreams, it creates a virtuous cycle. Their motivation and positive attitudes improve. They become more ambitious about what they wish to achieve. They will work harder for themselves and for you. There is a holistic benefit that flows through their entire lives.

Just as an improvement in your personal balance sheet allows you to leverage those assets to enhance your net income, the analogy is true for your worker. Their version of net income is Quality of Life, enhanced by leveraging their new asset of time.

PayActiv is not only proud to partner with UKG, but grateful. UKG shares our values of empowering workers to live the lives they’ve earned so they can fully participate in the economy they helped create.

Learn more about UKG Wallet and start offering earned wage access today.

This post is courtesy of Larry Meyer, SVP of Public Affairs - PayActiv. Access is more than a paycheck. It's peace of mind.