Let’s Invest! Employees need caregiving solutions.
The Job Is “Caregiving”. Common Pseudonyms: informal care, family care, personal care, home care, elder care.
The US and other countries are facing a socio-economic crisis that is only now slowly coming into focus.
It involves an estimated 43.5 million people who have “caregiver” responsibilities, most already have a paid job. Today’s numbers will explode as 70+ million baby boomers enter their ageing cycle.
If surfaced, corporations would declare that today’s $33.6 billion in losses due to care-related productivity as a “fix it” priority. The first “fix” is to extinguish antiquated assumptions that employees can do another job called caregiving.
Next, define most caregiving roles as home care and get the topic of corporate resources doing a healthcare job on a strategic home care agenda.
Finally, our nation must embrace the reality that we are a working generation and are facing a decade of labour shortages.
The economic threat to corporations is rising exponentially. Care related workforce disruptions are converging at the same time that digital business restructuring efforts are the norm. It is time to merge our nation’s direction in the mobile enterprise, home care technology innovation strategies and corporate needs for a sustainable labour market. Oh, working caregivers could use a break as well!
The Principles of Using Enterprise Technology to Meet Care Needs
We’ll get into the specifics of assisting employees with needs for integration of work and care duties. Before that, it’s useful to understand the philosophy and principles of using technology to provide resources, improve productivity and in meeting the total life commitments of the workforce.
Employees’ Family Care Technology Must Be Part of Your Business Portfolio
A whole-business approach to supporting the business and employees with long-term care challenges is smart business. This means involvement at the highest levels of the business including your management board and executive suite. Securing their commitment to integrating care sensitive platform into the culture, modifying the policy, and increasing the connectivity of work, working and care.
The Issue of the Current State of Caregiving Technology
The main issue with family caregiving or home care technology is that there are thousands of separate, disparate healthcare apps and approaches, none of which are effective at meeting enterprise or employee needs. This makes choosing the right technologies very confusing and complex for the average consumer. The thoughts of analyzing the pros and cons of the technology are daunting, any dream of connectivity is far off. Your corporate productivity roadblocks deepen as you discover that very few apps are designed for caregivers and none at all for employees expected to be caregivers. Since caregiving is seen as an individual, family or a healthcare matter, you will not find employee caregiving or associated corporate management software in Best Buy or on Amazon. Your organization can take the lead here as the most progressive corporations will see the future, invest in the best platforms and advocate for employee and corporate solutions.
You need a unified and aligned business operations platform that can
- Offer a modern policy and technology ecosystem that makes sense to corporations, teams, employees facing care challenges, and the people receiving care.
- Integrate business, HR, IT, mobile and other digital solutions for your employees and corporate managers.
- Stimulate technology providers and entrepreneurs to develop digital product lines and infrastructure.
Businesses can start to address simplification and effectiveness needs in the short term by helping employees screen, connect, and bookmark offers that improve their individual and team effectiveness. In other words, support employees and teams with reasonable work and care success investments in technology. A win-win.
The Current State of Play — Using Technology to Innovate For
Attainment of Superior Work Results and Meet Family Care Commitments.
As you can see from the list below, the technology possibilities supporting home caregivers are extremely diverse and disparate. It is unifying this list and creating proper responsibility and accountability that needs to be at the heart of a good corporate workforce and employee caregiver strategy.
When crafting a workforce technology platform, a key driver is workforce mobility. Virtual teams collaborating across on- premise and remote locations is becoming a non -negotiable item [in appropriate job assignments]. Remote work is a well-documented resource saver and employee motivator. The obstacles to use are trust, digital performance capabilities, and horizontal management skills.
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“The bottom line is that working from home can make a worker more productive, but that isn’t a guarantee. However, it’s safe to say that, according to studies, as long as the job is one that can be performed from home [anywhere, anytime], most people are more productive when working from home but — that productivity is strongly subject to the policies put in place by the employer.” Forbes ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Corporate Caregiver Technology
Managers will agree that it’s essential to have a high-level view of business operations and workforce effectiveness. Your business reporting can be expanded to include your employees who face unique care challenges. This can give you early warning of endemic problems and growing trends and give you enough lead time to put solutions in place. The challenge is to source and then integrate the right information.
There’s a lot you can learn from business intelligence and data analysis. If you have a large workforce, you can track the behaviors of caregiver employees over time. Dig into reasons for absences, productivity, and performance, you can use this insight to create new solutions to make employee home-based care easier. Consider the possibilities of an expanded data collection and more comprehensive work, working and carefully managed the environment.
Technology Can Help to Cover Staffing Due to Employee Care Absences
No matter how well you plan, care-related disruptions or absences are unavoidable. When that happens, you will need technology that can reroute work to other team members, support those who opt to work in a virtual team capacity or other ways during that absence.
If you already have worked anywhere, anytime policies in place, you can help to alleviate the productivity losses, as some caregivers will still carry out work, whenever and wherever possible. In other cases, technology can provide performance tools, cross-skilling so that other employees can take on added responsibility when needed.
An important employee resource is to help employees hire home care staff. You can easily screen agencies, create a service provider list and link employees to credible home care staffing services. Employees who have confidence in-home care staff’s capabilities will see that hiring their care provider enhances their job productivity, reduces stress and gives the team time to work out flexible plans.
However for extended employee care absences, you will want to link to external staffing services that can temporarily replace the missing employee. Team leaders can easily connect to expanding freelancer technology platforms and online staffing providers to plug a shortfall or disruption in productivity.
Mobile Enterprise Technology for Business-Critical Applications and Software
More and more medium-sized businesses and large corporations are moving to mobile enterprise technology. A superior workforce is a blended on-premise, remote, mobile, digital and flexible team. This is good for your customers and your staff, but it’s especially useful to your caregiver employees. Aligning collaborative, “work from anywhere, anytime” policies, connecting external online resources with mobile enterprise plans can allow your caregivers to maintain their productivity and commitments on one digital “screen”.
This means ensuring management, work, performance and mobile enterprise capabilities for the reinvented corporation. Digital competencies will equip the critical mass of employees in the workforce for broader responsibilities. The word “inclusive” now takes on the broader meaning. One set of combined workforce policies — including care challenged workers is the answer.
Communications Technology Implementation Is Critical
Enterprises perform best when there are free, open, and easy communications. Investing in good communications technology can make life much easier for caregiver employees and the total team. According to 2015 Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) Study, “traditional technologies remain the top forms of employee communication, but enterprises are increasing the use of video conferencing and telepresence technologies”. This technology is waiting for broader use.
Expanding eLearning Technology
Progressive corporations are using blended versions of online, Management Learning Systems to build employees’ job performance. Moreover, as the boundaries between work and life are blurring, mLearning strategies can adapt to include general education, interactive communications, soft and hard skill development. You can evaluate mobile learning, online classes, traditional learning to institute work, life and caring skills development. Education programs are a key to transformation. It’s not just the employee caregivers that you need to support, but their supervisors as well.
Healthcare Provider Caregiver Technology
eHealth Care Can Cross Traditional Boundaries for Employers and Employees From wearable devices that track vital signs to medication reminders, disability assistance tools to remote monitoring tools, fresh information can be targeted for use by employees on their jobs.
However, this can reduce some of the stress and anxiety of your caregiver employees. As an employer. You can encourage the use of these types of tools. And give your employee caregivers the time and resources they need. Up to the minute information from connected devices could easily reduce productivity distractions including lengthy visits to the doctor’s office or checking care conditions at home.
Moreover, telemedicine is a rapidly advancing technology that uses mobile devices to connect medical professionals with patients. Effective, virtual healthcare systems can sometimes diagnose issues from a distance and provide recommendations for follow-up treatment.
eHealth Care
In addition, an employee with care roles could be involved in this communications and decision making from any work environment. This might mean your caregiver employee does not need to leave work. And can eliminate travel time to get to the doctor or another healthcare provider.
Bringing together the tools and device capabilities to the worker’s personal screen takes an accepting culture and software integration effort. The Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile enterprise software are ideal conduits, yet need top-down direction and cross-industry partnerships.
However as you can see, there’s plenty of technology that could be targeted to work, life and caring uses.
Some of this technology will be specific to working individual’s choices, many must be universal, corporate-wide solutions. However, most of it will enhance your enterprise as a whole.
Boosting staff morale, simplifying work and external commitments, and enhancing overall business productivity. The shrinking labour market requires modern incentives to attract and retain your best workers, work-life-care brand identity is powerful.
However, this is a long list of current and potential technology that could be incorporated into your next business plan. In addition, you can coalesce your visioning team, develop a connected business. Workforce, people and technology strategy, and then implement the connected work.
Life and caring ecosystem for your business and employees’ success. Successful journey!
Also, read about changing workforce need to support employee carers
