As back-to-school season highlights caregiving stress, helping working caregivers is essential
By Evan Falchuk, CEO
More than 70% of today’s workforce are caregivers, with many taking care of their parents and their children at the same time. Back to school season is often a big added stress for these workers. New childcare gaps emerge. Parents juggle work deadlines with school drop-offs. Coordinating backup care for children or parents, and the worries about illness as the colder months approach, can get harder. The stress compounds.
Working caregivers have higher levels of burnout, increased rates of absenteeism and leave, reduced productivity, and above all higher healthcare costs. That’s right- the often relentless stress and strain of caregiving makes caregivers more likely to get sick, and more likely to struggle with self-care. It adds up to higher, and avoidable, costs for employers.
There is a tremendous opportunity for employers to save money – and do right by their employees – by recognizing the problem and building a strong culture of care and core solutions to support employees facing these critical challenges.
3 Steps to Building a Culture of Care
Creating a culture of care isn’t a nice-to-have for today’s employers; it’s a strategic imperative. Here’s where to start:
- Normalize the caregiver experience. Many working caregivers keep their caregiving struggles to themselves. But with so many employees balancing work and caregiving, it’s a great benefit to your culture to help these employees feel seen. Internal communications about benefits should recognize caregiving.
- Implement targeted solutions for caregiver burnout. There are many benefits that have low utilization as stand-alone offerings. Integrating a comprehensive caregiving solution like Family First can take a big chunk of caregiving work – like care coordination – off of employees’ plates. It can also drive increased utilization of other benefits, such as mental health, that help employees better manage caregiving burnout.
- See caregiver support as an integral part of health care cost control. Caregivers have higher medical costs than their non-caregiving counterparts, often by as much as 10%. Caregiver burnout drives higher rates of depression, higher rates of complications for chronic conditions like diabetes, and increased risk of cardiovascular events. Supporting caregivers reduces health risk for this big population of workers, creating medical cost savings and cost avoidance in year one.
Grab the Opportunity to Save Money by Helping Employees in Need
Back to school is a time of year that shines a spotlight on the challenges working caregivers face. Letting these workers know that you recognize the problem and have built solutions to help them manage their responsibilities is not only a way to help these employees feel supported. It’s also a way to drive meaningful bottom line results for your organization.
Evan Falchuk is the CEO of Family First, the leading clinician-led caregiver advocacy solution serving over 2 million lives and nearly 500 organizations nationwide.
