What does it take to tackle in-work poverty?
What does it take to tackle in-work poverty?
Ola Kolade, Employment and Skills Director at Business in the Community, explores what emerged from BITC’s In-Work Poverty Lab and how employers are putting those insights into practice.
Last year, Business in the Community Scotland published In-Work Poverty in Scotland: What Employers Need to Know, exploring why in-work poverty matters for businesses and what the evidence tells us about its impact on employees, workplaces and wider society.
Since then, we’ve been asking a different question: What does it actually take to tackle in-work poverty in practice?
Over the past year, BITC’s In-Work Poverty Lab has brought together employers, expert organisations and public sector partners to explore that question. Through workshops, leadership discussions, lived-experience surveys and focus groups, we’ve heard honest reflections about what’s working, what’s not, and where employers can make the biggest difference.
And perhaps the most striking insight was this: The challenge is often not a lack of action, but a lack of connection.
What we heard
Many employers are already providing support through wellbeing initiatives, employee assistance programmes, flexible working arrangements, learning opportunities and financial support. Yet time and again we heard that employees don’t always know what support is available, don’t know how to access it, or don’t feel comfortable asking for help.
Financial hardship can be difficult to see and even harder to talk about. We also heard how barriers to opportunity can be greater for carers, single parents and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, with ethnicity, gender, disability and caring responsibilities often compounding disadvantage.
One thing became very clear throughout the Lab: employers cannot address these challenges without listening to the people experiencing them. Creating opportunities for employee voice and lived experience to shape decisions was consistently identified as one of the most powerful ways to understand where support is needed and how it can be improved.
Another strong theme was career progression.
While financial wellbeing support is important, many participants spoke about progression as one of the most powerful long-term levers for tackling in-work poverty. Yet too often, employees struggle to see a clear route forward. Limited networks, hidden workplace rules, unclear development pathways and a lack of confidence among managers can all become barriers to progression.
Turning learning into action
While every organisation’s journey will look different, five common areas for employer action emerged:
Employer action in practice
The Lab helped employers translate this learning into practical action in different ways:
Sodexo: making progression visible
Sodexo is using colleague stories to show how employees have progressed into leadership roles, while improving how benefits such as childcare support, discounts and mortgage advice are communicated to frontline colleagues.
Business Stream: embedding financial wellbeing into everyday practice
Business Stream has made in-work poverty a standing item within its wellbeing and employee engagement governance, while rolling out NatWest’s Financial Foundations course and using colleague stories and the language of “financial hardship” to reduce stigma and encourage conversations.
Aegon: moving from individual action to organisational strategy
Aegon has developed a more structured organisation-wide action plan, drawing on employee insight, social mobility data and Lab learning, while strengthening links between this work and senior leadership.
Aberdeen Group: extending financial wellbeing across the supply chain
Aberdeen Group has piloted financial education through the Money Ready programme and is exploring how this could extend to supply-chain partners. It is also looking to embed financial wellbeing into structured training and its annual benefits cycle.
These examples reflect the openness and commitment of the organisations that took part in the Lab. We would like to thank Aberdeen Group, Aberdeen City Council, Aegon, Business Stream, Enterprise Mobility, NatWest, Sodexo and Wheatley Group for sharing their experiences, challenges and learning throughout the process.
Alongside participating employers, the Lab also brought employers together with Citizens Advice Scotland, Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Government, creating a space to share evidence, lived experience and practical approaches to tackling in-work poverty.
We are also grateful to The Robertson Trust for funding the project and enabling employers and partners to come together, amplify lived experience and identify practical actions.
What comes next
This is only the beginning. If our initial report helped us understand the challenge, the Lab has helped us understand what works in practice. The next step is giving employers practical ways to apply that learning within their own organisations.
Building on the evidence, lived experience and employer insights gathered through the project, BITC is now developing a new digital tool to help employers better understand, identify and tackle in-work poverty within their organisations. It will provide practical guidance to help organisations move from intention to implementation, with a planned launch in January 2027.
The conversation does not end here. The real opportunity now is to build on the momentum created through the Lab and translate these insights into meaningful action, creating workplaces where everyone has the opportunity not just to be in work, but to thrive in work.
