Erica Page, Country HR Director at The Adecco Group Australia and New Zealand had received requests for cashed out leave, salary advances and financial support. So, when she heard about the sense of financial security and control Wagestream could give employees, a pilot was put together. Wagestream has now been rolled out to more employees across the company.

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Why did you partner with Wagestream? Was it to meet any specific objectives? 

Our CEO mentioned Wagestream to me after my team had done a lot of analysis on our wellbeing programs, looking at holistic wellness and health. We realised that while we were very strong in a lot of our offerings compared to our competitors, in the financial area, we weren’t as strong. That’s where Wagestream came in.

As Head of HR, I knew we needed extra support in order to find the right fit for our workforce. When my colleague and I first spoke to Josh and Brad from the Wagestream team, I really did feel that the proposition was right for us. We ran a trial with a pilot group which was successful and rolled the program out thereafter.

What attracted you to the idea of earned wage access?  

Working in HR, people come to ask for an advance on their pay. I think that by the time they come, things must be pretty tough for them.

As we are a corporation, we’re not allowed to loan people money. We need corporate governance to get something like that approved, so it’s not something we can do.

I’ve had colleagues come to me to claim their two-week ‘cash out leave’ arrangement. If someone is willing to cash out one or two weeks of their leave, and they only get a small amount of that each year, there really must be a cash flow issue.

Even in my own life, raising a family, I’ve known times when cash flow has been tight. Just knowing that has happened to me, made me realise with Wagestream we could really do something to help people. That’s what I liked and why I was so interested.

How did you and your team find the implementation process?

By the time we came to implementing Wagestream, Covid-19 had arrived. The imperative for it went through the roof. We knew people were worried about the impacts Covid-19 could have on their families and their lives. Many of our staff had partners who lost their jobs, so giving them more flexibility for managing their money was even more important.

In a big company like ours, we quickly had the CEO on board, but then we had to make sure the legal team, IT team, security team and the payroll manager and their team were all on board as well.

Many of my colleagues had a lot of questions for the Wagestream team, they answered every one of them and were there for the long haul to get us through.

The Wagestream team put my colleagues’ minds at ease that it was going to be smooth. And it was. The implementation process was 5/5, 10/10, 100/100 – however you want to say it.

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Would you recommend Wagestream to other employers? 

100% I would recommend Wagestream to other employers.

We also see Wagestream being free as really important. People’s lives are complicated. Sometimes they might have a big expense that pops up and Wagestream can really help.

I think people also like to look at the app and just see how much they might be able to get access to. The Wagestream experience has been really seamless.