Why are you so focused on employee wellbeing at Excelsia?

As an organisation pursuing growth in the higher education space, we’re all about unlocking our employee potential. We see wellbeing as key to enabling and fulfilling unlocking their potential, so wellbeing is a big part of our employee strategy as well as our business strategy. 

While we want to hit our strategic goals and one day become a university college recognised for our research, we also love to hear it when our staff hit their personal goals. Particularly as someone working in HR, I love hearing when staff have pulled together their finances to put a deposit on a house or when they’ve been able to save to go and visit their family overseas. 

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One of your wellbeing initiatives has been rolling out Wagestream, why did you decide to focus on financial wellbeing?

Financial wellbeing became part of the conversation in 2020. During the pandemic, we had a number of staff who were talking to us about their financial stressors. We have a lot of casual staff as well, so there were job security questions coming up left, right and centre. 

In addition to our own measures of instilling confidence through maintaining pay increases throughout that period, we wanted to do something extra so our staff could have support through a system like Wagestream.

We also wanted to focus on financial wellbeing because we found finances to be a distraction to staff. Their stress was impacting how they approached their work, so we wanted to have measures in place that could help them during times of heavy expenses. 

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What business challenges has Wagestream helped you tackle?

From an HR perspective, a broad one is employee engagement. Alleviating a stress factor is removing a cause of distraction and that helps sustain employee engagement. 

Life stressors including finances can be a distraction for staff who are undergoing seasons of financial hardship and we find that Wagestream enables support to alleviate financial burdens, minimise stress and distraction and allow for greater engagement at work.

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What made you decide to implement Wagestream? 

I think the simplicity of the service for employees and employers was part of the attraction of Wagestream. It’s available to employees whether they use it or not so they always know it’s there.