Companies face a growing yet largely undetected threat to their worker productivity, employee retention and, ultimately, competitive advantage: the needs of employees who are caregivers.
The aging population, an increasingly female workforce, and the tightest job market in half a century make supporting caregivers a critical talent management issue, according to a new report, The Caring Company: How Employers Can Cut Costs and Boost Productivity by Helping Employees Manage Caregiving Needs, by Harvard Business School’s Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman.
“Helping employees address their personal caregiving obligations is an approach employers almost entirely overlook as a mechanism for maximizing employee productivity and minimizing turnover,” the authors write in the study, which was released Wednesday.
With almost three-quarters of employees providing care to a child, parent, or friend, more workers are scaling back, stepping away, or choosing alternative professional opportunities that help them balance these demands.
Companies that ignore this emerging crisis risk losing their hardest-to-find and highest-paid employees—skilled, educated professionals—potentially to competitors that move faster to meet caregivers’ needs. With those employees goes the substantial investment that companies make in recruiting, retention, and training, says Fuller, who co-leads the Managing the Future of Work project. Raman is the project’s program director and senior researcher.
“Companies don’t realize that there are material returns associated with helping these workers,” says Fuller, a professor of management practice. “If I told an executive, ‘You could reduce your turnover of key personnel by 3 percent,’ they would say, ‘Where do I sign?’”
The caregiving perception gap
To quantify this business issue, members of Fuller’s team surveyed two groups. They asked 301 human resource leaders and business owners in the United States how they approach caregiving benefits. And they asked 1,500 employees who provide or expected to provide unpaid care how those responsibilities affected their careers. Even though the majority of employers and employees said they considered their organizations inclusive and fair, employees said that employers penalized caregivers, especially when their duties caused them to miss work, come in late, or leave early. Among employees surveyed:
- 59 percent said that caregivers are perceived as less committed to their careers
- 55 percent said caregivers are less likely to progress as fast as their peers, even if they put forth the same effort
- 47 percent said that caregiving affected their work performance all or most of the time
- 32 percent admitted to leaving jobs that didn’t support their caregiving needs
Employers, represented by the HR leaders and business owners, seemed oblivious to employees’ challenges, with only 24 percent acknowledging that caregiving impacted performance. However, the behaviors that hold back an employee’s career were clear, with 33 percent of employers blaming missed work days and 28 percent citing lateness.
“How can a Kaiser Permanente compete against a sexier company like Google for talent? They probably can’t compete on pay, but they can compete on lifestyle.”
In their defense, employers said they provide benefits for caregivers—if only employees would use them. While 65 percent of employers said they offered flexible working arrangements—the most common caregiving benefit—only 39 percent of employees said they have used the benefit. Workers who haven’t said they feared that a flexible work arrangement would make them seem less committed.
Not surprisingly, few employers measure the impact of their employees’ caregiving responsibilities, saying that such an effort wasn’t needed, invaded workers’ privacy, or cost too much. Without this data, few companies understand the true costs of staff turnover, compromised productivity, and absenteeism.
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Joseph Fuller on measuring the costs of caregiving. (Courtesy Managing the Future of Work project.)
If you consider that senior executives who make more than $100,000—arguably the most expensive to recruit and retain—are most likely to leave a job because of caregiving needs, the costs could be significant. Add in wasted investments in ineffective or underused benefits and this hidden crisis becomes clear, Fuller says.
Building a “care culture”
Caregiving has long been an invisible issue to business leaders, especially among managers whose careers began when men dominated the workforce and women shouldered all caregiving needs. Now a vicious cycle persists: Employees suffer in silence and eschew potentially helpful benefits, and employers assume that employees are coping well and curtail these resources. Companies lack incentives to collect data or change their policies, so caregivers’ work performance deteriorates and bias against caregivers continues.
How can a company break that cycle? More companies need to develop a “care culture” that supports employees’ changing needs in the hopes of retaining skilled workers, Fuller says. Companies with care cultures:
Understand their employees’ evolving caregiving needs. They routinely survey their employees and evaluate the company’s demographics, so they can offer meaningful benefits and policies. They promote existing benefits and track their use to gauge whether they meet employees’ needs. And they encourage employees to discuss their caregiving needs.
“It’s motivating for people to be heard,” Fuller says. Managers need to acknowledge that many employees are caring for young children and aging parents, or both, and say, “That’s perfectly all right to discuss.’”
Adopt a framework for balancing a career and life. The linear career paths common at law, accounting, and professional services firms rarely take into account the personal milestones and unexpected challenges that all employees experience.
Caring companies recognize that employees’ needs for support, communication, and care benefits will change throughout their lives. Rather than wait for that to happen, caring companies anticipate those needs so they can support employees’ professional ambitions.
Identify the hidden costs of caregiving. A deep understanding of employees’ caregiving needs allows a company to evaluate new benefits or expand existing ones. Companies must not only ensure that employees know about such resources, they must also eliminate the stigma of using them.
Fuller says that it’s important for managers to model positive behavior and healthy boundaries to caregiving employees. After all, many managers are struggling with the same challenges, though they might not show it.
Increase caregivers’ productivity at work. Armed with employee data, caring companies develop clear care strategies that maximize the returns of their caregiving benefits and policies. They use test-and-learn techniques to pilot new programs before investing in a broader benefit rollout. And they have codified processes to help employees return from leaves of absence.
No company will be able to ignore the growing burdens on caregivers for much longer. Companies that tackle the issue now will build talent pools that provide a competitive advantage for years to come.
“How can a Kaiser Permanente compete against a sexier company like Google for talent?” Fuller asks. “They probably can’t compete on pay, but they can compete on lifestyle.”