Why and how the workplace should promote employee planning for caregiving

Employers are experiencing increasing pressure to attract and retain employees. Since the pandemic, employees have started to question the balance between work and life and are demanding more from their employers. In this vein, a vital niche the employer needs to give greater attention to is eldercare. Greater focus must be paid to eldercare, and the workplace should develop an Eldercare Culture that is infused both top-down and bottom-up through training applying a more proactive lens than the current EAP model.

According to the World Economic Forum, approximately 50 million Americans quit their jobs during the Great Resignation in the hope for higher pay, more benefits and/or better career options. Another vital issue that the pandemic highlighted was the tremendous caregiving responsibilities that many employees held; as Sharpe emphasizes: “While the top reasons people are leaving their jobs are for better pay and job security, many of us are quitting because we have to care for our aging parents at home.” Specifically, these caregiving arrangements are often very fragile as the caregiving arrangement is a patchwork of unpaid care which when “one thing falls through, your whole arrangement falls apart.“ Eldercare is a vital niche that the workplace must pay greater attention to because 1 in 5 employees are at risk of leaving the workforce due to caregiving responsibilities, and as the Rosalyn Carter white paper emphasizes, employers can and must be a part of the solution.

Premature exit from the workforce hurts the employee in terms of lost wages and benefits, and a high turnover in workforce participation hurts the employer in terms of hiring and training costs. A more nuanced assessment shows the losses occur before the employee quits and go far deeper in terms of lost productivity due to absenteeism, presenteeism and deteriorating health. For example, a study of employee caregivers found that ‘more than 80% of employees with caregiving responsibilities admitted that caregiving affected their productivity’ which stands in stark contrast to what employers are aware of in that “only a minority of employers (24%) responded that caregiving influenced workers’ performance.” This mismatch between what the employer is aware of, and the reality of what employees are burdened with should set off alarm bells within workplace management. Awareness and restructuring how we address employees’ caregiving responsibilities needs much greater attention now.

Moving forward, the workplace must address eldercare from both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. A top-down approach involves training of management around caregiver needs and burdens, and a bottom-up approach involves educating and supporting employees on planning for caregiving. First, focusing on management, this requires building empathy and a caring approach to employees’ concerns around caregiving. Empathy in this context reflects the ability to understand and appreciate the context of the caregiving situation. Caring adds another layer in that it promotes a supportive workplace. The key point here is to ensure management is given training to develop empathy and caring leadership skills in relation to caregiver needs and demands. For example, for those who have never taken on caregiver responsibilities, it can be difficult to understand the constant stress, guilt, and anger that some caregivers may feel. Therefore, the training of management will require understanding how the caregiver thinks and feels so management is better equipped to meet the needs of caregiver employees, and ultimately keep them in the workforce.

The bottom-up approach involves education of the employees around caregiving responsibilities. In my profession as an eldercare-consultant, I have come to realize that most people take on caregiving responsibilities with little or no preparation, and often this results in an abrupt exit from the workforce, be it either temporary or permanent. During this time the employee is frantically trying to figure out what is available to their aging relative who may have experienced a medical emergency. There are many reasons why employees hold off on preparing for a caregiver role, including lack of time in busy working lives, lack of knowledge, lack of confidence, and stressful family dynamics.

Unlike the current EAP model that applies a crisis management approach to employees’ needs, the workplace needs to provide opportunity for employees to acquire caregiving knowledge proactively. This means that employees are provided education before caregiving responsibilities becomes overwhelming. Many employees will acknowledge that they experienced months of growing concern for an aging relative but did not know how to initiate the conversation. Therefore, employees must be given training and support on how to initiate the caregiving conversation with aging relatives. Further areas for the employee to be given training on may include developing an action plan; resources and services available to older adults in the community; and caregiver self-care. Ultimately, the goal with a proactive approach to educating employees is to raise awareness and empower the individual to get started with the planning for their inevitable role as caregivers. Furthermore, this may help reduce anxiety, stress, presenteeism and absenteeism among employees.

The top-down and bottom-up approaches present as two key dimensions to an Eldercare Culture. To truly build this culture, the workplace must provide the time and place for these trainings; employees and management are not likely to take on the trainings unless they become a part of the work schedule. Finally, to ensure an effective Eldercare Culture, this will require data collection. There are many concerns management should assess, such as, specific needs and burdens of their employees around caregiving, employees’ perception around support/investment from management, and impact on work/life balance. Furthermore, employers should be ready to share the findings with their employees as this will help build transparency and trust in the workplace.

Read more: Expanding and evolving the definition of care

The workplace is at a pivotal space to address employees’ growing burdens with eldercare responsibilities. The key points are: 1) The workplace must take a much more proactive approach to meet the burdens of the growing number of employees who will need to step in as caregivers; 2) The workplace must provide education and training to management (top-down) and employees (bottom-up) in order to create an Eldercare Culture; 3) The workplace must carry out data collection through surveys, and share the findings in order to build trust and engagement. The workplace captures a huge audience of future caregivers. The programmatic solutions described in this article are relatively inexpensive and provide a win-win-win scenario for the employer, the employee, and the care-recipient.

Julie A. Norstrand, PhD, MSW, MSc