Elder care has begun to rival child care as a workplace issue, but there are important differences between the two. While some employees have children, others don’t. But most employees have living parents, and so elder care has the potential to affect more employees than child care does. Unlike child care, elder care is an unpredictable, variable event that can occur suddenly during a loved one’s health crisis, or creep up slowly as a relative’s health and functioning decline. It requires flexibility and responsiveness from both the employer and employee caregivers as well as supervisors and co-workers.
Child care focuses primarily on healthy children who live with the employee, but elder care involves a variety of services to respond complex financial, housing, health and legal issues that often need to be delivered at a distance from the employee. The relationship between caregiver and the person being cared for is adult to adult, long term and often involves an emotionally potent and uncomfortable role reversal. Unlike child care, elder care does not necessarily have a positive outcome. The care receiver becomes more and more dependent, and the process involves a number of siblings and other relatives and friends in ways that child care usually does not.
While child care and elder care have their differences, more and more employers are realizing that they need a holistic approach to human resource offerings involving all of an employee’s life stages and all generations at work.
10 Steps for Creating a Work Environment That Supports Caregivers
1. Evaluate your work culture, human resources, work life/flexibility, wellness, bereavement and diversity strategies. Review existing policies, programs and benefits to see if they can be modified to better address elder care needs. For example, if you have child care benefits, can they be expanded to older or disabled adults? Can a health fair be expanded to include community resources for caregivers and elders?
2. Check the costs of lost productivity in your organization by using the online elder care calculator created by MetLife’s Mature Market Institute: www.eldercarecalculator.org.
3. Analyze organizational and employee needs by doing surveys or conducting focus groups. Use the information to build a business case for implementing caregiving supports tailored to your company based on this research.
4. Based on your evaluation and research, retrofit existing policies, programs, benefits and human resource information systems to reflect these changes, and identify any gaps.
5. Research community services and government benefits and forge community partnerships to help implement low cost or free solutions to caregiver needs. For example, local offices on aging can offer on-site seminars on financial, legal and medical issues affecting elders. To find the closest office on aging to your business, go to the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging at http://www.n4a.org/.
6. Enhance current offering to include new programs, policies and benefits that are cost-neutral or money-saving solutions. Make sure that a list of existing, enhanced and new benefits that serve caregivers is included in employee orientation packets and communicated or distributed to all employees.
7. Implement culture change initiatives that involve a sustained outreach and education program that legitimizes employee caregiver struggles and needs.
8. Develop a method that tracks participation rates, cost-effectiveness and return on investment that’s logical, informative and easy to implement—and is not more expensive than the company offerings themselves.
9. Inform managers about caregiver needs and employee-sponsored elder care initiatives, and train them in the skills and solutions they might need to mitigate caregiver-related work/life conflicts.
10. Offer training workshops to help employees better assess their home and work situations, learn about company and community resources, learn how to effectively and comfortably talk to their direct supervisor about their issues as caregivers, and negotiate and jointly develop a plan that balances their work and elder care responsibilities.