Money worries don’t stay home when workers head to the office. For anyone paying attention to how people actually experience the modern workplace, the latest research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute makes something very clear: Financial anxiety is now a full-time coworker.

The EBRI’s eighth annual Financial Wellbeing Employer Survey found that companies are waking up to this reality in a serious way. Financial-related stress topped the list of issues employers want their wellness initiatives to address — ahead of retirement preparedness, ahead of budgeting, ahead of managing the punishing costs of daily living. Employers aren’t just worried about whether their workers can retire comfortably someday; they’re worried about whether those workers can function today.

This matters enormously to anyone who thinks about workplace design for a living.

For years, we’ve talked about designing offices that support wellbeing with better lighting, biophilic elements, quiet rooms, collaborative zones and spaces that give people genuine choice in how and where they work. But well-being isn’t just physical. It isn’t even just emotional in the abstract sense. Financial anxiety is one of the most corrosive forms of stress there is. It chips away at concentration, sabotages creativity and makes collaboration harder. A person calculating whether they can cover rent this month isn’t bringing their whole self to the morning meeting.

Financial health is woven into our lives, not siloed from the rest of human experience. When a worker can’t stop worrying about money, no amount of good furniture or thoughtful acoustics will deliver the focused, engaged performance that organizations need.

So what does this mean for the designed environment? Quite a bit, actually.

First, it means that privacy matters more than ever. Workers who are accessing financial counseling services, meeting with benefits advisors, or even just making a difficult phone call to a lender need somewhere genuinely private to do it. The open office falls apart here. If every conversation can be overheard, employees won’t use the resources their employers provide.

We need to design in the spaces — phone rooms, private booths, confidential meeting areas — that give people the dignity to handle difficult personal matters without an audience.

Second, the survey’s findings on personalization are instructive. Employers reported tailoring their financial wellness offerings to different groups like different age cohorts, different life stages and different geographic locations. The same logic applies to workspace. A 24-year-old grappling with student debt and entry-level pay experiences the workplace differently than a 50-year-old trying to catch up on retirement savings. One-size-fits-all environments fail people the same way one-size-fits-all benefits programs do.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, this research reinforces the idea that the office is not separate from life. It’s a central setting where life happens. When employers treat financial well-being as a genuine priority they’re acknowledging that the person who shows up for work brings their whole complicated human situation along. The environment should honor that.

The survey notes that most benefits decision makers expect their financial wellness budgets to keep growing in the near term. That investment, wisely made, can change the texture of daily work life in profound ways. But the physical environment has to hold up its end of the bargain with quiet spaces, flexible layouts and rooms where hard conversations can happen with privacy and respect.