Caring for Caregivers

Why Companies Should Care for Their Caregivers

Why Companies Should Care for Their Caregivers

The ability to successfully integrate work, family commitments, and personal life is important for the well-being of all employees. There are many challenges people face with regards to caregiving.

The growth of the aging population combined with a shortage of formal (paid) caregivers in the labor force means that working family members are having to step in and provide care for their aging loved ones. For some, these changes have created something called “the sandwich generation”: adults who are caring for an aging parent along with raising a young child (or supporting a grown child). But the shift is not only affecting working-age adults; it also impacts younger age groups and older workers who have delayed retirement. As a result, both employees and employers are suffering.

Why Should Employers Care?

According to this article you will find “employers in various industries are expressing difficulty in finding experienced workers, many of the skilled and productive workers they do have are struggling every day to integrate work and caregiving responsibilities. Employers often do not recognize just how many of their employees are caregivers or how prevalent caregiving responsibilities are for them. This is because only around half of employers track data on their employees who are caregivers, even less (26%) gather information on their employees’ needs related to care responsibilities, and only 24% were aware that these responsibilities influenced employees’ performance (Fuller & Raman, 2019).  

 According to a study by AARP and NAC (2020), employees with caregiving responsibilities who recently left their position most commonly did so because of the following reasons:

  • To have more time to care for their loved one.

  • The inability to find trustworthy and qualified paid help (this connects back to the LTC labor force shortage).

  • The inability to meet work responsibilities. 

  • The job did not allow flexible work hours or paid time off. 

  • The cost of paid help was unaffordable. 

In general, employees often make the decision to quit because they do not get the right kind of support they need from their employers (AARP, 2020). In fact, 75% of workers who retired early from work because of family caregiving reported that they would have stayed on the job if they had access to better support (AARP & The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021).”