Is It Time To Shift Your Corporate Employee Caregiving Ideology?

It’s no secret that the baby boomer generation is aging, more than 10,000 are reported to be reaching age 65 every day. As the demographics of our 70 million aging boomers grow – more co-workers will be tackling family caregiving jobs.

Moreover overlooked by most corporations is that these “individual” challenges of working and caregiving spill over to colleagues and team members. With an expanding worker and caring demographic corporations must evaluate the repercussions on business operations.  Today, annual care related productivity losses are estimated at $36 billion. It’s time to elevate the family care discussion to address business preparedness for strong organization success in care demanding workplace.

Are You Thinking About the Right Initiatives to Support Employee Caregivers?

As the labor market shifts, employees are expecting more. Low unemployment rates mean that there’s tremendous competition to attract the right talent for tomorrow — supporting at-home caregiving will reduce the anxiety and concern that a high-potential candidate may have in working for your organization. You’ll increase the attractiveness of your corporate brand, and significantly reduce the risk of talent loss.

Your competitors know this, and they’re already investing in caregiver support — businesses like Aetna, Bank of America, CBS, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Philips all include caregiver support in their employee benefits packages.

This is a good opportunity to build a strong employer brand, and create advocacy from your workforce. There are numerous ways that you can support and empower your employee caregivers.

Incorporate Preemptive Dual Employment Strategies Into Your Business and Workforce Planning

However as we’ve discussed above, you need to recognize these challenges and build out strategies and action plans now. Ideally, this should be sponsored by your HR or People head, and be supported by workforce planning, information technology, business operations, and other relevant departments. You will need to develop proper project plans, together with business analysis and suitable metrics to provide the effectiveness of dealing with caregiver challenges.

Remember, too, that this needs to be a holistic approach. You can’t just focus on the “medical” side of caregiving; you need to support flexible working practices, employee work and life balance, mobile working, and more. Solving these issues requires a combination of good management, support, technology, and business processes.

Partner with Traditional Healthcare Businesses and Healthcare Disruptors to Accelerate Employee At-Home Caregiving Solutions

You don’t have to solve this problem by yourself. There are many healthcare providers and startups increasingly getting into the caregiver space. Identify the ones who most clearly align with your strategic vision and partner with them to drive your plans forward.

Consider the Following Initiatives

There are many practical ways you can support employee caregivers’ individual challenges — here are some ideas:

• Organize workforce planning around flexible scheduling — introduce more flexible options for when employees are required to work, and build this into workforce planning. Give caregivers some “wriggle room” to manage their caregiving commitments.
• Support mobile working with appropriate technology — many employees do not need to be office-bound. Encourage at-home working and support it with the technology to help your employees be productive.
• Move from a vacation / sick days program to a general “Paid Time Off” program — removing categories from when employees take time off can reduce stress in having to fit caregiving into certain quotas. Employees get the flexibility to take time off for any reason.
• Offer employee assistance and counseling — you can provide an Employee Assistance Program as part of your employee benefits. This can provide counselings and resources to caregivers to help them cope with difficult times.
• Allow family members on health plans — However talk to your insurance provider about extending plans to cover at-need family members.
• Provide On-Site Healthcare Expertise — Moreover, you can engage an expert who can provide advice on medical and healthcare issues and assist with other, administrative caregiving tasks.

Care Challenged Workforce

As we experience the growth of the care challenged workforce. Progressive leaders will consider using technology to improve the way we work and care. “On the job” minimizing the need to go off premise. Mobile technology supports dispersed working and will meet overall employee interests in working where, when and how they want.  We can achieve higher value restructuring working and care obligations.

However, encourage entrepreneurs to dream of a working environment that connects employee family care solutions with on the job working applications.

In addition, imagine the developers of the Apple Watch expanding the heart-monitoring capability. To an employee care platform to remotely monitor health and administer care tasks that distract from daily effectiveness? Imagine business leaders, digital inventors, and healthcare planners building a better ecosystem to serve work and family care needs through the mobile enterprise, connected home and IOT added value direction?

Moreover, you can stimulate your business to collaborative in building integrated healthcare, and caregiving and working products, and services.

On the other hand on a practical basis, you can personally support all of these initiatives with policies to protect employee caregivers. The team and workforce through enriched business and job success resources, training. And education to get the most out of the support you provide.

In addition ss you can see, there is plenty you can do, starting now, to engage with employee caregivers. Provide the support they need, enhance productivity, improve morale, and build your corporate brand. From thinking about dual employment and caregiving challenges to creating a change in approach, and implementing the right plans, we hope this has given you a good starting point to tackle this issue in your business.

Also Read: Gaps in Existing Caregiving Ecosystem