Employees’ Home Care Burdens Are Your Economic Threat

by Jeannette Galvanek in Aging, Blogs, Caregiving, Economic Threat, Health, Home Care Technology, mHealth, Work Life Balance, Workforce strategy

How Your Business Can Use Technology to Address Employees’ Home Care Commitments

“Every day in the US, 10,000 baby boomers turn 65.” — University of Pittsburgh

There’s a ticking time bomb in the labour force, and it’s something your business must grapple with. If you don’t, you could lose some of your best employees, see higher absentee costs, and find it difficult to attract new workers.

The challenge you need to understand is this: as the population ages, your employees will need to devote more of their time to taking care of ageing family members. That’s going to mean lost productivity and big challenges in providing a healthy work, life, and caregiving environment.

We’re going to dig into how you can use technology to help solve this problem, especially for employees who need to provide home-care. Before we get into the details though, let’s explore the background to the problem.

The Scale of the Aging Population Problem

It’s hard to underestimate the impact our ageing population is going to have on the economy, your workforce, and long-term trends on attracting and retaining talent. The baby boomers are getting older, and their medical needs are increasing.

Census records show that there are over 70 million baby boomers, who, as of today, are between 54 and 72 years old. Corporations are ill-prepared for care related workforce losses, and people are lost in the maze of working and care expectations. This causes three issues for organizations like yours.

• Firstly, as needs for ageing care increases over the next 30 years, the majority of that care is expected to come from baby boomer families, families which include your employees.
• Secondly, if you want to attract and retain top talent, you must understand that employees will demand the necessary time and resources to address family caregiving.
• Thirdly, corporations are experiencing dramatic internal and external influences requiring re-evaluation of the business enterprise values, policy and relationships.

The headline is this: the latest National Alliance For Caregiving survey show that 43.5 people in the US have caregiving responsibilities.

Six in 10 are employed. Today, the total economic value of informal caregiver services provided by families of these baby boomers... is $523 billion. Over the next decade, care-related lost time and productivity across the US economy will proportionately escalate from currently assessed wastes of $33.6 billion.

Let’s look more deeply at the ageing care factor.

“We are witnessing the biggest economic, social and demographic shifts in history. Ageing and shrinking populations will result in fewer workers, innovators, and consumers while the emerging markets in hyper-growth areas will reinvent how the business has been done and revolutionize the workforce of the future.

Moreover, we are now immersed in the fourth phase of globalization, what I like to call the globalization of the corporate brain, which is about co-creation and talent for companies. The new workforce will overturn many traditional attitudes about workers, working, and the workplace. But to assess what these changes entail, we need to think globally.” —Wim Elfrink, EVP, Cisco Services and Chief Globalisation Officer, Cisco

In addition, corporations expect to address the impact of the inevitable shrinking labour market.

You also need to address the changing relationships caused by the changes in employees supply and demand.

We are entering a Talent Buyer’s Market and the rules are changing. Your potential employees are now in much stronger bargaining positions and you need to match your benefits, compensation, and incentives with their needs.

Remember too, that the employee care problem is so significant that it touches on every part of your business, therefore investments in institutional solutions are essential. Caregiving is no longer an individual, private, family matter.

In short, the tremendous influx of baby boomers into the 65+ ageing group and current demands that working family provide care requires a new mindset supported with a cross-industry and government national home care delivery infrastructure.

The government, Corporations Not Doing Enough to Address the Impact of Elder-care

Unfortunately, there are few macroeconomic, large-scale efforts in place to deal with this growing problem.

There are lots of ways to tackle the issue, but little progress to date. However issues like the scope of Medicare funding for family care. Progressive health care insurance coverage, changing elders’ long-term ageing behaviour, and access to community services are only delivering limited results.

Moreover, your list starts with eliminating antiquated assumptions that a working generation could provide caregiving without significant labour market disruptions. The US Health and Human Services organization establish contemporary home care policy. That could greatly enhance national economic and societal value with broader views of the problems and solutions.

However, continuing the current ideology for family caregiver roles will distract a critical mass of the non-healthcare labour market. This is not a direct fit for a modern era of work, working and care needs.

You Need Workforce Strategies for (PSOR\HHs Who Are Caregivers

There’s no simple solution for this emerging, global, work, working and caring transformation.

Moreover, we cannot deny the reality of baby boomers entering the next stage of their lives. However, leaders can use a time-proven way to success by including private sector executives. In addition senior healthcare providers, and top government decision-makers.

Simply, this means caring partnerships. Engaging consumers and sitting the goals to design a superior labour market, employment, and caring vision.

However baseline the facts, set standards, disrupts and innovate long-held beliefs, structures, and process. Measure short and long-term progress, measure short and long-term progress, Celebrate successes.

By the way, it is essential to connect business. Organization and technology efforts to initiate a work-life-care ecosystem for the enterprise. And each employee in the organization. If you want to revolutionize the way your business relates to employees with caregiving responsibilities.  You will need to approach the issue from multiple perspectives:

• Business —  Modernizing values, policy, technology platforms addressing the realities. The unrelenting external forces that are forever changing the rules for superior business success.
• Labour market and workforce — incorporating large-scale demographic, socioeconomic, technological and ageing population shifts into the business direction.
• Productivity — making it easier for employees to be fully engaged and productive, in a case-sensitive and mobile working environment. A good rule of thumb – each employee’s care challenge touches 7+ team members.
• Technology — ensuring full operational implementation of available internal systems and external devices, apps, and products. Innovating a connected 2021 corporate-wide mobile enterprise including care sensitive policy and services.

Also, read about investing for Employee Caregiving Solution