baby boomers Archives

Is Your Employee Doing Side Work?

by LizStevens | Sep 25, 2019 | Blog

Is your employee doing side work? Employees work side hustles to earn extra income in their off-time and these are the types of side jobs they’re taking on.

Is Your Employee Doing Side Work?

It’s called a “side hustle.” And, the latest research shows about one-third of U.S. employees, approximately 57 million people, are working side hustles to earn extra income.

Should traditional employers be concerned about an employee doing side work, also known as “moonlighting?” Maybe, and for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most important: More than 80 percent of Americans who currently have a side hustle are interested in doing it full-time, according to a recent SunTrust survey.

Are your employees doing side work? If so, what job(s) are they doing and how much are they making?

What Work Is Your Employee Doing On the Side?

AppJobs recently analyzed applications for side gigs to determine what the most popular side hustles are and how much they pay. The most popular side hustles are jobs that don’t necessarily require previous work experience, particular skills, or a degree, but still pay fairly well. Here are the top five most popular side gig categories according to the data gathered by Appjobs:

Delivery (105,314 applications) pays an average rate of $17.10 per hour
Freelance (95,866 applications) pays an average rate of $25.33 per hour
Petsitting (21,620 applications) pays an average rate of $13.17 per hour
Cleaning (14,143 applications) pays an average rate of $11.29 per hour
Driving (11,199 applications) pays an average rate of $14.36 per hour

“Hundreds — maybe thousands — of companies are making it easy for Americans to make extra money,” says Kathy Kristof, an award-winning journalist and editor of $idehusl, a website that reviews and rates online platforms that offer ways for people to make money on the side. “We’ve researched, rated and reviewed more than 300 of these online platforms. Where Uber and Lyft get miserable scores with our formula, there are probably 100 platforms that provide engaging, well-paid opportunities that could provide $500 to $2,500 per month in additional income. These opportunities involve teaching, cooking, creating tours, writing, programming and renting out everything from your carpet cleaner to your swimming pool.”

Which Generation Makes the Most Money from Side Work?

The SunTrust survey looked at how much individuals in each generation demographic make working a side hustle and found:

Millennials make an average of $10,972 from working a side hustle each year
Gen Xers make an average of $8,791 from side work each year
Baby Boomers make an average of $5,892 from side work each year

“Millennials often take on side hustles because they’re not earning enough to pay off their student debt and still have a life. Baby Boomers, who are retiring (or near retiring), are in the market because they feel like they’re not quite financially stable enough to leave the working world without some other way to make money,” says Kristof.

Should Employers Worry About an Employee Doing Side Work?

“Smart side hustlers are using their extra income to pay off debts and boost savings. That makes them a bit more confident about their ability to withstand a job loss. So, if their bosses are mean and miserable, they’re in a better position to walk away,” says Kristof.

“That said, what side hustles don’t give you are employee benefits and a work community. If an employer has a great benefits package and a positive, supportive working environment, most people won’t leave that — even if they have a side hustle.”

If you do notice a spike in your turnover rate, however, Kristof advises, “Ask yourself: How is my company faring in this changing workforce? Are we a place where people want to work, or are we just a place to collect a paycheck?”

“If you are nothing but a paycheck, you should worry — or, better, change. Ask yourself if you have tools in place to encourage your best workers to thrive. Are you talking to your workers? Do you know what they want/like/need from you? Are you listening? The freelance economy is bringing a sea change in the workforce. Those who are smart enough to adapt are likely to thrive.”

More On Employees and Management Strategies

Office Dress Code Policies in Today’s Workplace

Top 10 Workplace Etiquette Rules for Communication

Building Office Culture with Diversity and Inclusion

Hiring Trends to Watch in 2020

Why You Need to Train Employees for Future Tech

Top 10 Employee Benefits for 2020

2 Simple Strategies to Improve Office Culture

Is Rehiring a Former Employee a Good Idea?

How to Improve Gender Diversity in the Workplace

How to Make Traditional Work Better for Freelancers

What the Multigenerational Workforce Needs From Employers

by ryanwangman | Sep 9, 2019 | Blog

What the multigenerational workforce needs from employers. Millennials, Baby Boomers and Gen X need a personalized financial wellness program to reduce financial stress.

In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, you’ll likely need specially designed strategies to keep up with the various needs of your multigenerational workforce. From Millennials to Baby Boomers to Gen X, each generation has specific financial goals and pain points. To best help these employees, you need to understand which areas impact their wellbeing the most.

Financial Wellness Is Top Priority for Multigenerational Workforce

If you want to prepare your employees for what’s to come, Millennials and Gen X say that better job security is the number one thing that would most help them achieve their financial goals, according to research by PwC. When asked the same question, Baby Boomers are largely looking for lower healthcare costs.

Providing resources to promote employee financial wellness can improve workplace retention. Two in five Millennials and Gen Xers say their loyalty to their company is affected by how much the business cares for their financial wellbeing, and at least 75 percent of people surveyed in both generations say they’re more likely to be attracted to a different company that cares more about their financial wellbeing.

Multigenerational Workforce and Financial Stress

As the cost of living rises and wages struggle to keep up, employees are also having a tougher time keeping up with their day-to-day expenses. Fifty-seven percent of Millennials and 50 percent of Gen Xers say its difficult to meet their household expenses each month, an increase of 17 and 11 percent from last year respectively.

As you may well know, student loans are a rising financial concern for younger generations, particularly Millennials. Nearly half of all Millennials have student loans, and of that group, 80 percent say that their educational debt has a moderate or significant impact on their ability to meet their financial goals. To combat this problem, 37 percent of employees rank a student loan repayment benefit as their most desired employee benefit they’d like to see added in the future.

One thing every generation can agree on is that more employees than ever report they are stressed when dealing with their financial situation. There has been a double-digit percentage increase (ranging from 15-23 percent across generations) in the number of employees who reported financial stress since last year.

Financial wellness programs like Best Money Moves can help. Best Money Moves is mobile, gamified and easy-to-use. It provides practical, unbiased help so employees can make smarter financial decisions and manage the debt they have.

More on the Multigenerational Workforce and Financial Stress

3 Financial Stressors Affecting Every Generation

5 Must-Have Benefits for Millennial Employees

How Financial Stress Affects Gen X at Work

Top 3 Financial Stressors Affecting Gen Z

Financial Wellness as an Employee Engagement Strategy

5 Fast Financial Stress Statistics

Hiring Trends to Watch in 2020

4 Big Employee Benefit Trends for Family Planning

How Can Financial Wellness Be Improved?

Top 10 Employee Benefits for 2020

If you want to learn more about how Best Money Moves can bring financial wellness to your company download our whitepapers and sign up for a demonstration here.

Your Millennial Employees Aren’t Buying Homes Now. Here’s Why:

by ryanwangman | Jul 16, 2018 | Blog

A recent study from the Urban Institute shows that many Millennials are forgoing home buying due to student debt and high rental costs.

The data is in: With a different socioeconomic makeup and different living preferences than generational predecessors, your Millennial employees are less likely to be homeowners than Gen Xers or baby boomers.

A recent report from the Urban Institute found that Millennial employees are more likely than their counterparts in older generations to delay marriage and childbearing, life milestones that often lead to homeownership.

And while Millennials as a whole are owning less homes, black and less educated Americans are falling even further behind. Minority households have homeownership rates close to 15 percentage points lower than white households. Additionally, there is a gap of about 10 percentage points in the homeownership rate for households with high school or less education versus those with some college education or more.

High rental costs and increasing student debt haven’t helped Millennials who are looking to save money for a down payment. In a recent federal survey, 53 percent of renters said a barrier to homeownership they faced was “I can’t afford a down payment to buy a home,” and 33 percent said “I can’t qualify for a mortgage to buy a home.”

The report also noted that Millennials prefer to live in high-cost cities with inelastic housing supplies. These cities — like the East Coast’s Boston and New York City and the West Coast’s San Francisco and Los Angeles — tend to have greater urban amenities and more job opportunities, making them more desirable for Millennials to live in.

To address these issues, the Urban Institute offered four key policy recommendations:

Increase homeowner awareness and financial knowledge by providing online training as well as education in high school and college
Utilize financial technology for a more efficient mortgage process
Include rental and utility payment history data in Millennials’ creditworthiness evaluation
Adapt land-use and zoning regulations to increase the housing stock

Whatever the next steps forward, it’s clear something has to change to enable a greater number of Millennial employees to set down more permanent roots and purchase homes.