We’ve seen paid family leave come in and out of priority over the last few weeks in an attempt to pass the Build Back Better agenda. To be clear: Paid family leave is a critical part of the working family caregiver’s journey and should be a baseline benefit.
While we at Ianacare — a virtual platform to support caregivers — continue to advocate for paid family leave to pass in the federal agenda, we’re always focusing on what opportunities we have to impact caregivers today.
According to a new
Read more:
Employers and HR leaders play a pivotal role in creating new structures of support for family caregivers. It has been proven that integrated support positively impacts businesses by increasing employee productivity, retention and engagement. The question is: What can be done today in this ever-changing shift of the way we live, work, and care?
Ensure benefits are accessible and simple.
What we have learned from working with thousands of family caregivers is that they take leave or step away from their jobs entirely to research, navigate and manage the day to day logistics of care.
Contributing to this is the fact that employee benefit programs are highly fragmented, leaving them inaccessible and disorganized for employees to find in a time of need. Benefit utilization rates continue to be the number one challenge employers and HR teams face. Without proper resources,
Read more:
So much of this time and stress can be saved if they had one central location to access everything available to them. By investing in benefits and resources that leverage technology to create a more comprehensive and simplified environment, employers can ensure higher utilization and impact.
Create a culture where employees feel comfortable asking for help.
Seventy percent of working caregivers suffer in silence at work. Many are afraid to share what they are experiencing at home because it has not been normalized to talk about caregiving in the office. This leaves employees feeling isolated and unsupported. But 1 in 6 employees is caring for a loved one — this is not a unique or random experience.
The pandemic has made it inevitable that employees bring their whole selves to work. The more we welcome and communicate what our responsibilities look like outside of work, the more our employees will recognize different ways of integrating work and care. Leaders have such a powerful influence in catalyzing this shift by modeling it themselves.
Read more:
Beyond just offering paid leave when employees have run out of options, benefits are such a tangible reflection of what employers value and how they want to care for their employees. Creating benefits that address every aspect of employee support acknowledges the work-life integration challenges we’re all facing.
Customize offerings to reflect the specific and individual needs of your employees.
Beyond the major life events employers are already addressing, the workplace has a unique opportunity to become better equipped to support a more holistic spectrum of life events for employees, including caregiving.
When considering benefits, many employers search for the solutions that can cast the widest net, to address the most common needs of the largest number of employees. In reality, over
In fact, when Anthem Inc. implemented caregiving platform
Read more:
These initiatives from employers, combined with public policy, are critical to support the growing legions of family caregivers — 54 million today, expected to be at least 75 million in the next decade — that do important, necessary work of caring for their loved ones. While we wait to see the outcome of federal paid leave, let’s make changes to provide better benefits and options for working family caregivers.
