How to Make Your Workplace More Caregiver Friendly

Already over 40% of employees care for aging relatives. With 10,000 Americans having their 65^th birthday every day, soon, most workers will have caring responsibilities. The workforce is destabilized as employees volunteering to care for family take on more and more tasks. What starts out as just a few hours a week ends up lasting for an average of 5 ½ years and taking more than 25 hours a week.

Most employees can stay healthy and keep up on work and family responsibilities as they take on up to 10 hours a week of caregiving. Over 10 hours, they perform healthcare activities. In fact, 58% are already performing nursing care, such as medication management, monitoring vital signs, and wound care.

Making your workplace more employee-caregiver friendly can help your employees reduce the time they spend offering supportive healthcare to family. You have the choice of offering technology that increases independence at home, also decreasing the stress-inducing employee guilt. Managers can offer alternatives to sending employees home for a care-related emergency or transporting a family member to a doctor’s appointment, all while increasing communication between family and health providers. Using new tools will mitigate the premature placement of family in skilled nursing facilities, saving significant family resources. Current practices still make sense, such as essential leaves of absence when care needs advance. 

A workforce that feels publicly supported by the executive team and local managers will be rebranded to:

• Attract and retain talent
• Reduce absenteeism
• Minimize legal issues
• Reduce medical costs due to caregivers’ equity, medical and stress needs

Rebranding with appropriate local workplace reinforcements obviously influence more teamwork and higher morale.

The Costs of Making a Workplace More Caregiver Friendly

Modern, enlightened employers understand how creating a positive corporate culture provides benefits that can’t all be easily measured. Yet, making a workplace more caregiver friendly for all employees has tangible, measurable, monetary benefits.

The Harvard Business School report The Caring Company estimates that employers lose at least $10,900 annually for each caregiver on staff. At 40% of the workforce and growing, this is a significant hit to our economy. Remember that every employee works with many others, and their planned and unplanned needs spill over to team schedules, work reassignments and perceived fairness.

So, when an organization implements programs to offset those losses, there’s a lot of room before deployment becomes an expense. Most employers find that an investment of less than 25% of current caregiver-related waste will recoup the time, morale, and expense.

Solutions for Caregiver Friendly Workplaces

So, let’s imagine an organization invests that 25%. What programs, systems, policies, and technology could make a significant enough difference? While every company is different, and the details of current policies vary, foundational principles guide the elements of a corporate culture that effectively supports family caregivers. CareWise Solutions has crafted solutions for employers to immediately translate thoughts to business actions.

Executive Thought Leadership

Executive buy-in is critical to developing a wave of attitudinal and behavioral change. Messages from the executive team are customized from templates written by experts in the field.

Team Leader and Management Training

Team leaders require training on topics such as:

• Working with Employee Caregivers
• Fairly Managing Mixed Teams of Caregivers and Non-Caregivers
• Inclusivity
• Legal Requirements (Litigation is up over 400% in the past 5 years)

Employee Caregiver Training and Support

Employees require training and support to help them:

• Maintain their physical and mental health
• Remain productive at work
• Navigate government and insurance resources
• Ensure their family member receives the best care possible

The CareWise Solutions HUB

• Implementation of a Caring Place
  • Learn to use our BrioCare mobile AI-supported technology for daily employee and family care coordination. The BrioCare App System connects those at home with their employed family member, medical resources, and a wide variety of everyday and emergency services.
  • Access CareWise curated work and care supportive Apps for customized a wide variety of everyday uses and services.
  • Encourage internal IT and HR departments to connect the Caring Place Hub with internal HR programs and their external benefits providers

HR Professionals Development

Implementation of state-of-the-art work and care solutions

• Enrich a professional competency and leading-edge status across the industry
• Translation of    employer’s commitments to line managers   
• Educate internal and external communications agencies about employer commitments
• Create customer sales and service practices   to preserve customer relationships
• Upgrade benefits programs
• Engage employees with surveys and participation in design teams for care innovation

All Employees – Build Healthcare Literacy – Education or Orientation for the Entire Team

• Family Caregiving ideology is shifting, attitudes, attention to the details of employee’s wellbeing and needs is a business priority
• Instill understanding that caregiving for aging baby boomers and people with disabilities is a long-term business commitment, with employee and executive measurements
• Just as employees develop a performance or career plan, all employees will do proactive care and work planning

When your organization is ready to examine how to make your workplace more caregiver friendly, contact CareWise Solutions™ for expert advice. We care because you have wrought a care challenge on your agenda. Our well-researched, off-the-shelf products provide a foundation to immediately deploy caregiver-friendly solutions with customizations available as required.

For more information about Employer Programs to make your workplace more caregiver friendly, CLICK HERE.

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