Increasingly, small businesses are “offering to help key staff pay their divorce bills in an attempt to retain valued personnel.”
This, according to the Financial Times of London, last Friday.
One of the more personally fascinating aspects of divorce for me is its greatly underestimated impact on employee productivity. I’ve often thought that if employers bothered to consider and measure the toll of workers’ marital challenges on their company bottom-lines, they’d be more proactive with offers of assistance.
And, you know: Sympathy. Surely, that, too.
The Financial Times piece talks in terms of an 18-month window from onset to Judgment of Divorce, for “more bitterly contested” cases. That, of course, is the cliché. Consider lead-up and recovery, and the real number becomes a multiple of that.
We’re not just talking declines in piece-production output here, involving blue collar workers, either.
Article author Jonathan Moules quotes one divorce lawyer in saying that “divorce can have a significant impact on the office mood….”
Compromised concentration and distraction are also points of emphasis.
Heads-up, bosses!
