Gaps in Existing Caregiving Ecosystems and What We Can Do About It? — Your Questions, Answered
We’ve already talked about the growing pressure on employee caregivers and others and that post provides some very useful context for the questions we’re going to answer here. It’s important that we look at some of the more structural issues and problems with employees being primary caregivers, and what needs to change.
However we’ll explore what bought this situation about and answer your questions on the major issues, trends, what we can do, and the various responsibilities of those directly or indirectly impacted by employee caregiving.
How did we reach this employee caregiver situation in the first place?
The fact is that an aging population and other demographic changes have led to this strain on employees challenged to provide caregiving. Caregiving itself, although it is poorly defined and assigned, is no longer just the responsibility of an elder’s family. We need to take a step back and look at the end-to-end problem.
- In addition to the ongoing, 30-year migration of Baby Boomers from healthy to getting older and demanding more care.
- The sheer scale of the issue, with 10,000 Boomers a day turning 65.
- The lack of a comprehensive, consistent, standardized caregiving infrastructure.
- The increasing shift of the burden from institutions and healthcare providers onto individuals.
- The assumption that individuals and employees will pick up the slack and solve the issue themselves.
Even as societal, demographic, labor market, and employee motivation factors have changed over the decades, caregiving assumptions have not. More and more caregiving tasks are informally assigned to the family by unaware professional medical, healthcare, or social services staff.
What cultural and societal shift should we aim to reduce the employee caregiving burden?
There’s no easy answer to this question, as solving the dual-employment (employees doing their paid and unpaid care jobs) and wider family caregiving issues require considerable effort and attention at every level:
- Federal and state governments to set high-level policies and incentivize organizations. To treat this issue as a broad cultural, economic and employment requirement. Employees with unpaid caregiving jobs must be secure by national labor laws and corporate policy.
- Corporations to create modern employment and family care policy to ensure the right number of workers are available from their respective labor market.
- Non-profits to revise caregiving ideology to support a sustainable corporate workforce and provide relief for employees who are conflicted with informal caregiving obligations.
- Moreover insurers to build provision for elder caregiving into insurance plans, at a sensible price for individuals and businesses.
- Moreover, healthcare providers to offer credentialed caregiving jobs. Connected work-life-caring technology platforms and resource alternatives than the current non-professional, unpaid caregiving workforce.
- Businesses to provide investment, support, and leadership for employee caregivers.
- Individuals to become informed consumers. Make the best choices for job retention and meeting family care needs. In addition to take advantage of the help and support that’s currently available, and watch for future changes.
Moreover ultimately, we need universal corporate work, life, and caregiving values. However, we need shared aspirations for a national caregiving infrastructure. We need dependent care-centric, connected products, and services provided through a collective delivery channel. These are lofty goals, but the size of the problem demands them. We are experiencing a 35-year change in demographics, and institutional solutions are late to the starting gate.
Also, read about Employee Caregiver Challenges
