Employee Family Caregiving Expectations Spill Over To The Team
Employee Family Caregiving Expectations Spill Over To The Team
When thinking about 70+ million baby boomers heading through a 30-year cycle of ageing, we are seeing the burdens on employees who are expected to provide family care in addition to their paid job. We are beginning to understand the current costs to corporations today.
It is time to begin opening Pandora’s box to see how the burdens of employee caregiving roles spill over to the larger workforce. The employee caregiver and team are becoming the newest majority of the workforce.
For the sake of understanding the scope of the interconnected worker spillover, consider an average size team of 7 people working together to meet business, customer and regulatory demand. Now, imagine that just 1 of these team members is in a position of being a part or full-time care challenged employee.
The 1st or 2nd time this team member has a crisis the impact may be minor. The team regroups, tries to come together to fill in the void.
The 3rd or 4th time it happens, it may no longer be a few hours or an unscheduled absence, but days, (6 being the national average) unanticipated by management and the team with no real way to mitigate damage.
The team is finding itself strained, less capable of meeting deadlines and consumer demand. Quality slips; morale tanks. Team members try to be supportive but begin to feel resentful. This puts management in a difficult position of being completely unable to plan for even the next day.
What Does This Mean?
When you couple what we already know about the impact of family caregiving expectations we can begin to understand the negative impact on our society. The baby boomer population turning 65 is growing by 10,000 people every day increasing the required ageing care services.
The burdens on care challenged employees are not changing soon. The spillover to the larger team is not going away soon either.
A 2016 LifeWorkx study reported that employees felt that their productivity began to decline after five-seven hours of care per week. What is an equitable leeway for a co-worker to accept before feeling that the organization is not being fair?
In order to see systemic change, there must be a change in mindset and values. It is not acceptable to refer to today’s employed family caregivers as heroes or the hidden backbone of the caregiving system. They are casualties of poor fiduciary accountability.
Labor Market
In addition, maybe leaders don’t yet realize that their labour market is being hijacked by the unprepared healthcare system? Maybe they can’t see the impact on 7 workers, not just 1. Working people deserve the opportunity to live, work and care with reasonable personal choices.
Ageing adults ought not to feel that they are a burden on their family. Co-workers must feel that corporate work-life-care policies are equitable.
What are reasonable solutions? The top agenda items are worker flexibility and leaves of absence. How do those options align with the workforces’ burdens of family caregiving? The employee, team and corporate issues are daunting.
However, the solutions for business success lie in mandated changes to the antiquated expectations of workers. Teams and workforce to respond to the lack of preparation of our nation’s fundamental long-term care plans.
Moreover, the 1950s are gone. It is a very real national goal for working family members to shed the expected family caregiver job. National resource reallocations are a great idea. Actually, it is very possible that modern, local, wellness and care services jobs are waiting for a multi-skilled workforce to staff them. That healthcare workforce plan would be sure relief for non-healthcare workers and teams!
Moreover, the private sector is in a prime position to prioritize relief for employees with caregiving burdens and across the workforce to turn around the shrinking bottom line of business operations.
Also Read: Digital Work-Life and Caregiving Solution
