That's a wrap on SHRM! SHRM26, the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo, took place June 16–19 in Orlando and drew nearly 20,000 HR professionals. Your Money Line attended with our 'HR Recovery Lounge' booth, complete with a photobooth, a margarita bar, and a mimosa bar. If you stopped by, you might remember us from our fun shirts!
We were impressed with the expo hall this year. The swag keeps getting more and more creative, with sparkly bags, fun stickers, and engaging booth activations like catching flying money (yes, we're taking notes for next year) and coffee with smiley faces on top. And did anyone else see the grilled steaks on the expo hall floor? Our team may have stopped by more than once. Or twice.
After conversations with HR leaders from across the country (and the world!) on the expo hall floor, a few things stuck out to us.
Ask any HR pro what they were enjoying most about the sessions this year, and you'd get the same answer almost every time: AI. AI. AI. Session after session was built around AI and how to put it to work across the organization, but what does that actually look like in practice?
The best use case is eliminating the busywork that steals hours away from HR's week. It's great to speed things up, but there are some things you simply can't replace: the conversations with your colleagues, the camaraderie of hitting a team goal together, the sensitive, human conversations that come with the job. AI can't replace the part of HR that makes HR, well, HR.
The same goes for your benefits. Employees want their benefits to feel personal, relevant to their actual life, not a generic perk list. AI can help with answering routine questions or surfacing insights they'd never dig up on their own. But when it's a big, sensitive decision, people still want a real human on the other end of the line.
A new report launched at SHRM26 by SHRM in partnership with Raymond James, The State of Financial Wellness: Challenges, Gaps & Opportunities, dug into the disconnect between the financial pressures workers are facing and the support structures employers actually have in place. TLDR: organizations need strategic, integrated financial wellness programs, not just a benefit that checks a box, to close the gap between what employees need and what employers are offering, and to drive real engagement, retention, and productivity in a tight talent market.
The numbers back it up. Most workers are dealing with real financial stress, many can't absorb an unexpected expense without going into debt, and the cost of ignoring it adds up fast and turnover alone can run 50–200% of an employee's salary. Meanwhile, the organizations actually investing in financial wellness are seeing it pay off in engagement and retention.
The findings point to one clear conclusion: financial wellness isn't a nice-to-have benefit anymore. As James Atkinson, PhD, Vice President of Thought Leadership at SHRM, put it: "Financial wellness is no longer a secondary benefit; it is a core component of organizational resilience and workforce sustainability. When organizations invest in fully integrated financial wellness programs, they are likely to see real returns: stronger engagement, lower turnover, and better business outcomes."
401(k)s and EAPs don't cut it anymore. Don't get us wrong, they're still a great start. Helping employees through emergencies and nudging them to contribute to retirement matters, a lot. But on their own, they only scratch the surface of what people actually need.
Because here's the thing: money isn't just a once-a-year, open-enrollment kind of problem. It's a Tuesday-afternoon kind of problem. It's "can I afford this car repair," "should I refinance," "how do I even start paying off this credit card," the everyday stuff that keeps people up at night, long after HR has gone home. When it comes to those moments, employees don't want a binder of resources. They want a real person who actually knows their situation and can talk them through it like a friend who happens to be really good with money.
That's the shift we kept hearing about at SHRM26: financial wellness is becoming less of a single benefit and more of a full support system. Scalable enough to reach everyone and personal enough to feel like it's actually for them.
No SHRM26 recap would be complete without mentioning Oprah Winfrey's keynote, which closed out the conference. She didn't talk about ATS platforms or PTO policies. She talked about people, and the room got quiet in that way it does when someone says something everyone already feels but hasn't heard put into words yet.
"You all are in the business of creating culture. You're the custodians of culture," she told the crowd. "Human resources isn't just about spreadsheets and policies. It's about human potential."
She shared stories from decades of interviewing presidents, celebrities, and everyday people, and said the same truth kept showing up no matter who sat across from her: everyone wants to know they matter. As she put it, "There is not a person that you meet or see, and certainly not anybody that you're dealing with in your work environment, that doesn't want to know that they're OK."
It was the perfect note to end on. Every session, every booth conversation, every stat in that financial wellness report, it all pointed back to the same thing Oprah said on that stage: the tools and technology will keep changing, but the job has always been about people.
The "I Heart HR" tote bags were the real MVP of the conference. We have to talk about the bags. If you walked away from SHRM26 with a sparkly "I Heart HR" tote, congratulations, you got the real prize of the conference. We ran out of those things embarrassingly fast. Lesson learned: never underestimate an HR pro's love for a good tote bag. Next year, we're making more. A lot more.
And that’s a wrap! SHRM was a great time! If you attended the conference, we hope you had a moment to unwind at our HR Recovery Lounge! If you didn't make it by, or you're just finding us now, we'd love to meet you. Curious what financial wellness could look like for your team? Schedule some time to learn more!
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