We are dedicated to providing our members with essential support to help manage their work-life challenges so they can live engaged, productive lives and get the most out of every day. Here’s just a sample of the feedback we’ve received from members this month.
Tag: employee benefits
Why Employees Need Flexible Backup Care Choices
Not all backup care programs are created equal.
Some programs offer only child care solutions, for example, overlooking the vast number of employees who shoulder elder care responsibilities. Other programs fail to provide self-care and pet care solutions, and many programs offer little to no flexibility regarding copay amounts and the number of times employees can use the benefit in a given period.
One of the most significant shortcomings of many backup care programs concerns placement restrictions: employees are encouraged to place their loved ones into specific centers or with specific in-network providers. In other words, employees aren’t given an option to choose their backup caregivers … And that can feel downright scary.
Flexible Options Maximize Choice and Peace of Mind
The main purpose of a backup care program is to keep employees on the job and productive—even when their regular care arrangements break down. Backup care programs give employees confidence and peace of mind precisely because of the choices and options they provide. When employees are encouraged to use only centers that are owned or operated by the backup care program provider itself, or that are strictly in the provider’s network, it actually undermines the purpose and effectiveness of the program, i.e. they may be less comfortable using the program and opt instead to miss work.
A strong backup care program offers employees a wide array of choices among vetted, high-quality caregivers (both center-based and in-home caregivers, as well as those who are in and out of the network) along with the option to use their own privately secured caregiver, such as a babysitter, friend or even family member to provide care. This unbiased, flexible program model has quickly gained favor because many employees feel far more comfortable leaving children, elders and pets with caregivers they know and trust.
The connection between flexible options and peace of mind has been made clear again and again by feedback LifeCare has received over the years from our clients’ employees and our clients themselves. Here are just a few examples (with the individual’s confidentiality maintained):
- “I always prefer to have my family help me with backup care. They know my children, how they eat and how I want them disciplined.”
- “Great to be able to use a trusted person who my kids know and who is familiar with their routine.”
- “I really like the flexibility of using the friends and family option. It makes the transition to work very easy when you have family helping you out.”
- “The flexibility (of your program) gets our employees to work with peace of mind.”
If your organization hasn’t implemented a backup care program yet, you can read about five compelling reasons to do so here. You can also read about the hard and soft ROI backup care programs deliver here. And you can learn how to secure budget for a backup care program here.
If you’d like to learn more about implementing a high-quality, highly flexible backup care program, contact us here or call us at (833) 282-3366.
3 Tips for Nurturing Your Employer Brand
Your company’s brand is far more than a logo or trademark. It’s everything that comes to mind when a person sees or hears your company’s name—the good, the bad, the true, the false, even the emotions it stirs. For many decades companies have worked diligently to build and manage this complex mix of impressions.
Only during the last 10 years or so, however, have they devoted a similar level of attention to their employer brands. Your employer brand is everything that comes to mind when people think about you as an employer—the types of jobs you offer, your company culture, what your current and past employees say about you, your compensation practices, the benefits you offer and so on.
Your employer brand is every bit as complex as your company brand, and just as important.
Why Your Employer Brand Matters
Your employer brand is crucial to attracting, recruiting and retaining quality talent. Whatever candidates know or learn about you helps them decide whether to look at your job ads, careers webpage and other recruiting channels and content. And the more they know about you, the more effectively they’ll self-select into or out of your jobs, which improves the quality of your applicants and reduces your recruiting costs.
Believe it or not, your employer brand also affects your overall company brand. A strong employer brand can help influence potential customers and investors to do business with you, while a negative employer brand can drive them to your competitors and do significant damage to your reputation.
Tips To Build Your Employer Brand
With so much at stake, here are three things you can do to nurture your employer brand and improve your ability to attract and retain high-quality talent:
- Ensure that your employer brand and company brand are aligned. When they are, both brands reinforce one another and project a clear, consistent image to the marketplace. When they’re not aligned, they can confuse candidates and prospective buyers about your company, its mission, core values and culture. One way to make certain the brands are in sync is to have HR and your recruiting team work closely with your C-suite and Marketing department (who are typically the keepers of the overall company brand). Together you can determine exactly what and how to communicate to candidates based on the larger context of your company brand. For example, if your company brand stands for innovation, speed and disruption, your employer content should reflect this. Keeping the two brands in alignment not only helps you maintain a consistent image in the marketplace, but it also helps your recruiters find and engage talent more efficiently.
- Make employee benefits part of your brand’s story. Without a doubt the quality of your jobs is the main draw for new talent. People want to do work that is meaningful to them. But make no mistake, compensation and the benefits you offer matter almost as much. This is because pay and benefits are concrete outward symbols of how you value employees and the respect and support you give them. These are critical aspects of any employer brand and how candidates think and feel about it. As we shared in a previous post, 62% of workers say benefits are a key reason they accepted a job with their employer, and 73% say that having benefits increases their employer loyalty. So, when telling your brand’s story, don’t forget to highlight your company’s benefits and the programs you have in place to support employees and their families.
- Enlist your employees as brand evangelists. One of the most effective ways to build your employer brand is to encourage your employees to share their personal stories, insights and opinions about working at your company via Glassdoor, LinkedIn and other social media websites. The reason this tactic is so effective is because it’s completely authentic as you’re enabling employees to tell their stories in their own words. What could be more engaging to candidates and potential employees? Of course, sharing these stories online is only one way to leverage them. You can also bring employees who are willing to share their stories into the recruiting and onboarding process, allowing them to speak at recruiting events and during orientations, for instance.
Overall, your employer brand should convey what makes your company a great place to work. Implement the three tips above and that message will come through loud and clear.
If you’d like to discuss how to strengthen your employer brand—and the types of benefits and support programs that can really make your brand stand out—contact us here or call us at (866) 675-3751.
These 3 Cost-Effective Programs Boost Employee Wellbeing
Each June, in honor of Employee Wellbeing Month, U.S. employers give special attention to improving the health and happiness of their workers.
The truth is it’s always a good time to improve employee wellbeing because the outcomes are so invaluable to your business: higher productivity, lower turnover, reduced absenteeism, and fewer expensive illnesses, to name just a few. So whether you’re looking to launch your first wellbeing initiatives or enhance your existing efforts, here are three high-impact wellbeing programs that won’t cost an arm and a leg to implement:
- A Lactation Program—One way to show your commitment to wellbeing is to help your organization’s mothers return to work after having a baby. A high-quality lactation program offers prescreened referrals to lactation resources … 24/7 access to experienced consultants who provide guidance on breastfeeding challenges and concerns … and breast milk shipping so working mothers who travel can safely ship their milk home. LifeCare’s Mothers@Work program also offers discounted Medela breast pumps and a special kit filled with free breastfeeding products and information. 70% of employees who’ve used the Mothers@Work program say it made them more productive, 92% say it made them more loyal to their employers, and 98% say it reduced their stress.
- Legal and Financial Services—Legal and financial concerns are among the most pervasive and potentially debilitating issues your employees face. In fact, the majority of U.S. workers are now stressed about their finances. You can help employees handle these issues with minimal stress and disruption to their productivity by giving them access to reliable legal and financial services that connect them with qualified attorneys and financial professionals. These services can include in-person and telephonic consultations, document preparation services, and identity theft protection and recovery, among others.
- Work-Life Services—Research has consistently shown that work-life services benefit both employers and workers. One of the most recent examples occurred late last year when the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management issued a series of documents designed to encourage agencies to offer work-life programs because these programs “benefit our federal workforce and positively impact recruitment, retention and organizational performance.” In 2018, 82% of people who used LifeCare’s work-life programs said we reduced their stress levels; 80% reported an increase in loyalty to their employers; and 72% said our programs increased their overall productivity.
In addition to supporting your employees’ wellbeing, these three types of programs also boost engagement, satisfaction and loyalty levels.
Two Halves of Wellbeing: Health & Happiness
The mission of Employee Wellbeing Month is to “spotlight the workplace’s role in helping to create healthier, happier employees.” Although employers have known for decades that healthier employees are less costly to their businesses and provide a competitive advantage, they’ve only relatively recently begun to regard employee happiness in a similar light. This viewpoint is backed by a growing body of evidence proving organizations thrive when employees are happy.
“One study found that happy employees are up to 20% more productive than unhappy employees,” writes AIM Leadership CEO Camille Preston in her Forbes article, “Promoting Employee Happiness Benefits Everyone.” “When it comes to salespeople, happiness has an even greater impact, raising sales by 37%. … The stock prices of Fortune’s ‘100 Best Companies to Work for’ rose 14% per year from 1998 to 2005, while companies not on the list only reported a 6% increase,” she notes.
So what drives employees’ happiness at work?
According to MetLife’s recently issued report, “Thriving in the New Work-Life World,” the top five drivers of employee happiness are:
- Trust in the company’s leadership.
- The company’s commitment to employees and their success.
- A culture that encourages employees to share ideas and opinions.
- A workplace where coworkers feel like family and friends.
- Benefits customized to meet employees’ needs.
The report also offers statistics showing that happy workers are more satisfied with their jobs, more engaged, more successful and more loyal than unhappy workers.
Given the relationship between benefits and employee happiness, programs like the three listed above are a wise investment for your business’s future.
If you’d like to discuss the various benefits programs that can help your organization improve employee wellbeing, contact us here or call us at (833) 282-3366.
Infographic: Backup Care Utilization at a Glance
This infographic displays statistics around backup care program use by eligible LifeCare members in 2018.
If you’d like to learn more about implementing a backup care program or how LifeCare can create a custom program for your employees’ unique needs, contact us here or call us at (833) 282-3366.
3 Tips for Securing a Backup Care Budget
One of HR’s biggest challenges each year is deciding how to spend its employee benefits budget. While traditional benefits (medical insurance, 401k plans, etc.) remain a good investment, emerging benefits—such as backup care programs—are increasingly important to attracting and retaining talent.
In fact, research from Willis Towers Watson shows 79% of employers agree that emerging benefits programs enrich their traditional offerings by adding greater personalization, 75% say these programs appeal to a multigenerational workforce, 67% say they attract new talent, and 65% say they support employee retention.
Backup care programs, in particular, deliver a powerful array of hard and soft returns on investment, as we outlined in a previous post, including reduced absenteeism/presenteeism, greater productivity, higher employee engagement, and improved health of employees who act as caregivers.
The demand for backup care programs is mounting rapidly as our population ages and workers from every generation are or soon will be caring for children, aging loved ones or both simultaneously. As a result of these trends, more and more HR departments are making the case for backup care to their senior management.
Making the Case at Your Organization
Here are three suggestions to help you build a compelling case for backup care:
- Survey your employees. To show that your organization has a demonstrable need to support its caregivers, survey your workers about their caregiving status, situations and requirements. Ask whom they provide care to, how often, what their main challenges are, and what kinds of assistance and expertise they would value most. Regarding backup care specifically, ask how often their regular care arrangements break down, what they do when breakdowns occur, whether they have reliable backup care arrangements in place, and whether they use their own individual caregiver such as babysitter, friend, neighbor or family member as paid caregivers. Remember that many people don’t like to identify as “caregivers” for a variety of reasons, and many are reluctant to open up about problems that arise due to caregiving responsibilities, so be sure to make your survey anonymous. And the more thorough your survey, the better able you’ll be to select a program that suits your employees’ specific needs once you’ve gotten budgetary approval.
- Get clarity on the types of backup care needed. Large, multigenerational workforces actually provide a range of care—to children, to older family members and loved ones, to pets, and even to themselves. Use your survey to discern which types of backup care employees will utilize and appreciate most. Younger workforces may have a greater need for backup child care, for example, while older workforces may provide more care to aging loved ones. If your company has a significant population of individuals in the sandwich generation, you’ll need a more comprehensive backup care program.
- Gather and present trusted third-party data on the value of backup care and caregiver support programs. You can find data online through a variety of reliable sources including the Pew Research Center, the Family Caregiver Alliance, MetLife, AARP, and the National Council on Aging, to name just a few. You can also search this blog for posts about family caregiving and backup care; we’ve written quite a few pieces that contain recent statistics and links to useful resources. Data that can be especially compelling to your senior management may include the growing demand for employees to act as family caregivers, the generational impact of caregiving responsibilities, and the specific hard and soft business benefits of backup care (the money it saves employers, the productivity gains, the reduced turnover, stress alleviation, etc.).
Looking for assistance in building an evidenced-based case? LifeCare can help! With 35+ years of experience and expertise, we’ve helped organizations of all kinds support employee caregivers, providing them with information, guidance and referrals that ease their caregiving burdens and keep them healthy and productive. We’ll customize a plan to your specific needs that includes projected savings and ways your business will be positively impacted.
The case for offering a backup care benefit has never been stronger, as we detailed in a recent post on why your company needs backup care now. With all this in mind, it’s the ideal time to consider the many ways a backup care program would benefit your company.
If you’d like assistance building a case for backup care contact us here or call us at (833) 282-3366.
To Thrive, Employers Must Support Workers Inside and Outside of the Workplace
“If employers expect their organizations to thrive, they not only need to rethink the experiences they are creating for employees inside the workplace, but also how they are supporting employees outside of it.”
That’s the core takeaway from page one of MetLife’s latest annual employee benefits trends report, “Thriving in the New Work-Life World,” which is filled with insights employers can use to attract, engage, and retain the best talent.
The report makes clear that work and life are blending more than ever before and, as a result, workers are looking to employers to help them cope. “Employees need an ally,” say the researchers, “and employers can play this role by creating a workplace that not only recognizes employees holistically, but supports them holistically as well. … Traditional and emerging benefits can offer relevant support to employees—and they can be key ingredients for the kind of caring, trusting culture in which employees thrive.”
Why the focus on helping employees thrive?
“Because thriving, happy employees are better employees,” the report states. “They are more engaged in their work, are more loyal to their employers, and more meaningfully contribute to their organizations’ goals.”
Key Stats & Findings
Following are some of the findings from the report, based on MetLife’s 2018 survey of more than 2,600 full-time U.S. workers:
Stress:
- Employees’ number one source of stress: personal finances tops the list, regardless of age or life-stage. One in three employees admit to being less productive at work because of financial stress.
- Stress isn’t exclusively about finances, however—and employers are well positioned to help mitigate many of employees’ other pressures. Whether it’s easing the stress of work itself (the second biggest stressor), tending to personal or family health (the third biggest stressor), or managing personal commitments (the fourth biggest stressor), employers can play a substantial role in transforming the employee experience. The right combination of benefits and experiences can help employees feel more engaged and more cared for—and build the trust that enables them to thrive.
- Everyday stressors can pose barriers to employees’ happiness and distract them from succeeding at work. And while some of these relate to employees’ personal lives, the role that work can play — in adding to or reducing stress—is a common thread that runs throughout.
Benefits:
- 67% of employees are satisfied with their benefits—down 4% from last year.
- Better benefits is the third highest request on employees’ wish lists when it comes to what they need to succeed at work and navigate their work-life worlds. (And 30% of employees would actually be willing to trade a higher salary for better benefits.)
- 60% of employees are interested in their employers providing a wider array of less traditional, non-medical benefits, even if they have to cover some of the costs themselves
- 57% of employers are committed to offering their employees a wider range of benefits, including non-medical supplemental benefits like accident insurance, critical illness insurance, and legal services plans.
Benefits communication:
- Communication is key: if employees don’t understand the role that benefits can play in their lives, they won’t appreciate their full impact.
- Greater simplicity and clarity are needed: Only 4 in 10 employees strongly believe their employers’ benefits communication is simple to understand.
- Employers should change the benefits narrative by showing how benefits work together in the context of employees’ lives, needs and sources of stress. This can increase understanding and engage employees in a more meaningful and personal way.
- Employers should focus on communicating the relevance of the benefits packages they offer, including how benefits work together to play an important and useful role in employees’ lives.
Why Holistic Benefits Are Essential
The report also notes that, given the current robust job market and low unemployment, workers are less likely to stay with employers who don’t meet their work-life needs. Therefore, employers should design holistic benefits packages that employees can customize to their individual needs and that can be changed as their needs evolve.
Suggestions to help employers create these holistic programs:
- Supplement traditional benefits with EAP and well-being programs, which support an array of work-life challenges including mental health counseling, elder-care advice and life coaching.
- Provide employees an assortment of experiences and tools that help them better understand their benefits such as videos, guided learning experiences, and real utilization stories from their coworkers.
- Offer financial wellness programs featuring resources such as personalized advice, one-on-one guidance, and goal-orientated short- and long-term planning.
- Enhance retirement savings programs that offer employees ways to generate income during retirement and strategies for managing their savings so they don’t outlive them.
The report also addresses how employers can contribute to employees’ happiness, sense of purpose at work, and ongoing development—all of which are strong drivers of employee engagement and productivity.
If you’d like to learn more about how our work-life services can help you support employees with both their personal and professional needs, contact us here or call us at 866-675-3751.
Put These 5 Financial Wellness Trends to Use in 2019
Do employers have a responsibility for the financial well-being of their employees?
Remarkably, more employers (59%) than employees (50%) say yes to this question, according to MetLife’s 2018 U.S. Employee Benefits Trends Study. Even so, only 18% of companies currently offer financial wellness programs, workshops and tools to their employees.
This dearth of resources is about to end as 67% of companies plan to expand their well-being initiatives over the next three to five years to address non-physical aspects of well-being such as financial health.
In light of this growing focus on employees’ financial wellness, here are five voluntary benefits set to trend upward in 2019 and beyond:
- Financial education resources, including guidance by professionals. Most employees want to make their own financial decisions—but they want to be better educated about finances in general and they want at least some counsel from experts. This was clearly validated by PwC’s 2018 Financial Wellness Survey of full-time U.S. employees. It asked participants which benefit they would most like their employer to add, and their top response was a financial wellness benefit with access to unbiased counselors. Be sure the resources you offer address “the basics” such as debt counseling, budgeting and retirement planning. Consider using a variety of educational channels including online tools and resources, onsite workshops and seminars, and phone consultations with financial coaches. If you want to go beyond the basics, customized financial action plans and resources are excellent options.
- Student loan repayment benefits. These benefits (including debt refinancing programs and employer contributions to loan balances) will be especially popular among companies looking to attract younger workers and recent graduates. But, as a recent SHRM article pointed out, it’s not just youngsters who owe on student loans. In the U.S., more than 44 million people collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loans.
- Employee discount programs. A high-quality discount program gives employees access to national and local discounts from a variety of trusted brands, helping them save money on major purchases (a home, a car, vacations, etc.) as well as on everyday items (groceries, clothing, health club and gym memberships, school supplies, restaurants, and more). The best programs also help reduce employees’ child care and senior care expenses, which many families experience simultaneously.
- Installment loans and credit. These voluntary benefit offerings keep employees from making bad decisions such as taking out cash advances on their credit cards or taking payday loans when they face unexpected medical expenses, emergency home repairs, and the like. By providing them with low-interest loans they can pay off in reasonable installments or giving them access to credit at a reasonable rate, employers can forge strong bonds with workers and earn greater loyalty.
- Life event financial support. Another key way to help employees is to provide them with financial tools related to major life events— for example preparing for a baby, buying a new home, sending a child to college, or supporting an aging loved one. These life events are some of the most stressful your employees will ever face, and they represent significant money management challenges. Helping employees resolve them is a great way to raise loyalty and engagement levels.
Why Employees’ Financial Wellness Matters
The majority of U.S. workers (54%, in fact) are stressed about their finances. So offering financial wellness benefits could give you a decided edge in attracting and retaining talent. Indeed, the PwC Survey found that 68% of Gen X workers, 67% of Millennials and 50% of Baby Boomers are more likely to be attracted to another company that cares more about their financial well-being.
Talent attraction and retention aren’t the only business benefits of helping employees improve their financial health. As the PwC Survey report states: “Our research is showing that financial stressors are not only negatively impacting employees, but are costing employers. Stressed employees are found to be less productive, take more time off to deal with financial matters, are more likely to leave the company for higher compensation, and are more likely to cite health issues caused by financial stress. These findings evidence a direct correlation between an employee’s financial well-being and a company’s bottom line.” In short, helping employees remove financial stressors is every bit as good for your business as it is for your people.
The fact is, employers are already adopting a more holistic view of financial wellness. According to last year’s Health and Well-Being Survey, conducted by Fidelity Investments and the National Business Group on Health (NBGH), 90% of employers now consider financial well-being to be one of the top three components of an employee’s overall well-being (physical and emotional health are the other two).
But as the MetLife study makes clear, this altered outlook hasn’t yet translated into widely available resources for employees. If you act soon to implement financial wellness benefits, 2019 could be a breakout year for your talent strategy and your employment brand.
As always, if you’d like to learn more about implementing financial wellness benefits or other results-oriented work-life programs, contact us here or call us at 866-675-3751.
4 Strategies for Managing Your Company’s Caregiving Costs
Previously, we shared key insights from Harvard Business School’s (HBS) report, “The Caring Company,” which highlights the shocking turnover and productivity losses caregiving inflicts on U.S. companies.
To gain control over these losses, HBS recommends that employers shift their perspective on caregiving—viewing it as a talent management challenge rather than merely a potential benefit expense—and consider these four strategies:
1. Promulgate a culture of caregiving. Such a culture requires “management to demonstrate commitment through sustained, consistent action, reassuring employees that the organization welcomes openness about caregivers’ obligations and wishes to support employees confronting caregiving issues,” the report states. “That, in turn, will oblige the organization to develop a visible, systematic plan to help employees balance their personal and professional lives, a plan that covers both on-boarding and reentry into the workplace.”
2. Adopt a framework for balancing career and life paths. “Companies will need to design career paths that are more compatible with their employees’ life paths,” the report says. These career paths must take into account the predictable patterns of a caregiver’s life and responsibilities. Doing so will enable employers to provide specific communication, support and care benefits these people need at the exact times they need it.
3. Identify the hidden costs of caregiving. “Companies cannot assess the merits of investing in more substantial care solutions without understanding the hidden cost of caregiving,” the report observes. Uncovering these hidden costs requires a number of actions including conducting a care census (a profile of the company’s care demographics and needs); developing metrics for understanding the actual magnitude of caregiving costs incurred; and pinpointing the turnover, absenteeism and presenteeism caused by caregiving. All of these actions serve as the foundation for developing an explicit care strategy and making “prudent investments” that offset turnover and productivity losses.
4. Boost the productivity of caregiving employees. This involves adopting a test-and-learn approach to implementing caregiving benefits (i.e., experimenting with benefits before deploying them widely); giving special consideration to benefits focused on critical roles and/or hard-to-fill positions; providing on-boarding benefits to returning employees; and even collaborating with other employers and local governments to develop shared solutions.
7 Steps Toward a New Competitive Advantage
Recognizing how daunting all of this might seem, the HBS authors also outline seven steps toward implementing these strategies:
Step 1: Conduct a care census to ascertain your organization’s care demographics. This critical first step, as outlined by the report, is essential if you aim to develop metrics for understanding the actual magnitude of your company’s caregiving-related costs. A care census entails: a) identifying the nature and scale of your workforce’s care needs; b) evaluating the relevance of your existing caregiving benefits; c) exploring the possibility of expanding these benefits; and d) capturing the returns associated with greater employee retention and productivity. Crucially, a care census also enables you to update your standard career paths to better reflect the life paths of today’s caregiving employees.
Step 2: Ensure that current employees are more aware of the benefits your company already offers. “Many employees appear to be unaware of the availability of care-related benefits,” according to HBS. You must communicate consistently about the caregiving benefits you already offer—and to reassure employees that your company “accepts the legitimacy of (their) care concerns.”
Step 3: Survey employees on their views of current benefits and identify the benefits they value most. HBS claims that many companies don’t know which benefits their employees desire or value most. This can create “a gross misalignment” between the benefits your employees actually need and those you offer. It also likely means the benefits you do provide are doing little to reduce turnover, burnout and lost productivity. Regular, ongoing employee surveys are vital to aligning benefit offerings to caregivers’ needs.
Step 4: Add additional benefits that address unmet needs. Your employee surveys also can help you identify any caregiver needs that are going unmet. When you decide to add a new benefit, consider rolling it out to a small test group before deploying it widely. This will help you determine which programs are likely to be well utilized and generate the highest returns on your investment.
Step 5: Monitor utilization rates. Caregiving benefits must be monitored and measured with the same diligence as other more costly benefits, such as health care and retirement benefits, states the HBS report. This is the only way to accurately assess these programs’ impact on retention, productivity and engagement.
Step 6: Assess the impact of benefits relative to expectations and in the eyes of employees. Only you and your employees can determine whether a program is worth your investment. This is why a regular care census, ongoing employee survey, and diligent monitoring are so important. They are the best methods for determining the impact of your programs.
Step 7: Customize care benefits by adding those that are meaningful to employees. The HBS report polled hundreds of employees on which caregiving benefits they currently use and which they anticipate using in the future. Caregiving provider referral services, on-site or near-site child care and elder care, and counseling services were all near the top of the lists. Again, surveying employees is paramount ensuring that your benefits remain relevant and deliver a steady ROI.
Follow these seven steps and you’ll not only create a more care-friendly culture but, as HBS notes, you will also “build a new source of competitive advantage” by attracting and retaining key talent.
If you’d like to learn more about caregiving-related benefits or other programs designed to help you employees better integrate their work and personal responsibilities, contact us here or call us at (833) 282-3366.
Caregiving Crisis: Are U.S. Employers Looking the Other Way?
“American companies are facing a caregiving crisis—they just refuse to acknowledge it.”
That’s the opening of a recent Harvard Business School (HBS) report titled “The Caring Company,” a wake-up call to the nation’s employers on the alarming human and organizational toll of caregiving. To make certain employers don’t hit the snooze button, the report goes on to state, “This neglected care crisis is only going to worsen.”
The HBS report shares data from two surveys conducted among hundreds of employers and employees, and it sheds light on how the burgeoning caregiving crisis is already wreaking havoc with workers and their employers.
Here’s a sampling of the data:
- The Pervasiveness of Caregiving—73% of employees surveyed already report having some type of current caregiving responsibility. (The key word here is “current.” This figure doesn’t even take into account individuals who’ve had past caregiving responsibilities or the many who will be caregivers in the near future.)
- Caregiving Erodes Performance—More than 80% of employees with caregiving responsibilities admit that caregiving affects their productivity—specifically, their ability to perform their best at work all the time (33%), most of the time (14%), and sometimes (36%).
- Turnover Caused by Caregiving—Nearly one-third of employees report voluntarily leaving a job due to caregiving responsibilities. Notably, these aren’t just older workers: 50% of employees aged 26 to 35 and 27% of employees aged 18 to 25 report leaving a job due to caregiving burdens.
- Impact on the C-Suite and Management—Upper-level managers, senior leaders, and highly paid men were the most likely individuals to report that their jobs and productivity are affected by caregiving.
- Employers Don’t Fully Understand the Impacts of Caregiving—Shockingly, only 24% of employers recognize that caregiving influences their employees’ performance. Perhaps this is due in part to the fact that most employers (52%) don’t track caregiving-related data for their employees and few employees are willing to admit to their employers that they are caregivers out of fear that it will undermine their career prospects.
The upshot is that caregiving is laced with “hidden costs,” including major turnover and productivity losses, which are already undermining the wellbeing of American companies and their workforces. And the future looks even more troubling.
The Cold Truth
The HBS report makes it clear that the demand for and intensity of caregiving are only going to increase as our population ages. “More workers will have substantial caregiving obligations, causing them to arrive on the job physically drained and emotionally distracted. Their workdays will be subject to unplanned interruptions, undermining their productivity and inhibiting their longer-term career prospects,” the report states.
That has to send a chill through forward-thinking employers.
The HBS report is of undeniable value—if American employers embrace it, which is uncertain in light of the report’s somewhat critical tone. Telling employers they “remain strangely unaware” of the magnitude of caregiving’s economic consequences or “largely oblivious to” the growing costs of caregiving, for example, might undercut their willingness to take the report’s key messages to heart.
However, for those ready to acknowledge the escalating caregiving crisis, the question is: What can they do to combat it?
We’ll discuss that in our next post.
If you’d like to learn more about caregiving-related benefits or other programs designed to help your employees better integrate their work and personal responsibilities, contact us here or call us at (866) 675-3751.