CHRO Roundtable: How To Care For Caregivers

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More and more of the American workforce is caught in a brutal balancing act of caregiving and work responsibilities. A panel of CHROs discusses tackling the challenge.

It’s the start of another busy work week, and your company’s VP of sales has a kid home sick from school, again. Working remotely isn’t an option, and last-minute sitters are scarce. Meanwhile, her aging mother has an appointment that can only be scheduled during working hours. By the time she finally finds someone to babysit and makes it back to the office, she’s exhausted and her coworkers are grumbling. To top it all off, she’s starting to not feel so hot herself.

This sort of employee experience is at the heart of an unprecedented crisis facing American business. According to AARP and U.S. Census data, 68 percent of American children under age six have all available parents in the workforce, while 16.8 percent of the U.S. population provide care for a senior family member. With the massive generational shift currently affecting the workforce, that leaves many people pulled in three directions, caring for both the youngest and oldest members of their families while juggling their work responsibilities.

“In the last few years, we hadn’t seen this coming to the forefront, but I’d say in the last year or two we’ve seen a number of employees coming forward more,” said Shawn Gibson, CHRO for the Infotech Research Group.

Gibson was part of a roundtable of select CHROs organized by StrategicCHRO360, parent company Chief Executive Group and Perceptyx, a leader in technology platforms for monitoring and improving employee experiences, aimed at surfacing best practices for C-Suite leaders wrestling with what’s becoming a critical challenge for the American workforce.

This sentiment of increasing need was felt across the board. “Generally speaking, we’ve got a lot of remote work requests to take care of aging parents in different parts of the country, as well as illness accommodation,” said Jason Lioy,chief people officer of Dawn Foods, a manufacturer and distributor of bakery goods and ingredients. “So, [allowing remote work is] what we’re doing to retain talent.”

And the balancing act for employees, between caregiving and work, doesn’t come without impact: According to a study from the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and AARP, 23 percent say it is negatively impacting their health, 45 percent say it’s impacting their finances and 61 percent say it’s impacting their work.

In light of this, what are HR executives meant to do to best create a supportive workplace and advance company goals? Here are their tips and best practices for identifying caregiver needs, implementing effective policies, navigating workforce dynamics and fostering a caregiver-supportive work environment.

Ask questions—and listen.

One resounding theme was about thinking beyond flexibility—the hot topic since the rise of remote work in the pandemic.

“It’s hard, we’re a billable hour organization, and flexibility can be very, very tricky,” said Jessie Osborne, VP, global learning and development at AML Rightsource, a financial crime compliance firm. “It’s great to have all this flexibility, but if you can’t, what can you do for your employees that they actually want?”

It doesn’t have to be a guessing game to figure out those wants. Melissa Nelson, chief talent officer at law firm Levenfeld Pearlstein, noticed an improvement in communication “during the pandemic. We did a much better job of asking people what they needed and being really open-ended about what questions we were asking,” she said.

Diane Quick, VP, human resources at Pitney Bowes, a global technology company that provides services for shipping, mailing and e-commerce logistics, echoed the same strategy. “We introduced an employee listening tool,” she said.  “We had a workforce that spoke over 60 languages, and that tool was able to translate the feedback that they were providing to us. The local managers were able to see by site, what are the sentiments? What are people really struggling with? What do we need to offer them?

“With the surveys, we were able to see that a lot of people, even in the onboarding process…They felt checked out, they didn’t get the right kind of onboarding. We would lose people within the first 30 days. And that’s eye-opening with executives when you have that level of data that captures their attention. So it helped to reinforce that we needed to kind of invest in those types of programs.”

Tech to the rescue.

Many HR leaders are leaning on tech to get this right, with data and metric-driven approaches. Osborne uses a program to “take a survey every single week and that survey gives us macro trends that we can see and then try to respond to the employees. So it’s not always time and flexibility that we can offer, but what can we offer?” she said.

In Osborne’s case, it was learning and development in place of flexibility. “We find that they’re much more engaged in the business as a whole and they feel that they can balance their life and the business better if they’re going down a path that’s purposeful for them.”

Thinking beyond remote work.

While remote work remains a sought-after perk, CHROs noted more employees are advocating for resources beyond flexibility. “We asked people what they wanted and a caring group was one of the things we created,” said Andy Gold former CHRO at Pitney Bowes. “We would bring in different speakers based on what they needed, including how to find and navigate systems, especially for elder care. We brought in people to talk about how to take care of yourself as a caregiver.”

So did Josh Smith, head of Americas HR & global head of talent for Sedgwick, a provider of insurance claims management solutions. “It’s just like a Facebook group, an Instagram group, a LinkedIn group where they can get information from fellow colleagues in their areas, their geographies on how to best navigate that,” he said.

Being competitive with benefits is the best route for others. Natasha Patel, head of people operations for Yuvo Health, a New York firm that helps community health centers navigate value-based care, is often recruiting talent from hospital systems, where benefits are notoriously lacking. In order to attract and retain her people, it means making the deal plenty sweeter. “What we’ve done is take a two-prong approach essentially. We’re a remote-first company which is great for us. We require all employees to only be on for a very specific four-hour window Monday through Friday. And then outside of that, it’s flexible for them.

“We have unlimited PTO, which is new for a lot of folks that are coming out of hospital systems. We have 30 days of sick leave. We have a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, which is very different from what they see in the healthcare systems. So that’s been our main attraction for attracting that top talent into our organization and keeping them here because it’s very difficult to find those types of generous, work flexible and leave policies in in the healthcare industry.”

Beyond potentially expensive benefits, HR leaders have found other creative offerings for their employees. Smith has implemented a ramp-down and ramp-up process for employees going on parental leave. “Our objective is retention. One thing that we’ve piloted is pro-rating goals for parents returning from any kind of leave. So we will work with them to ramp up and ramp down their work. Maybe they have a couple months of 60 percent, then 80 percent, then 100 percent on both sides. We help them prepare for leaving, we help them prepare to come back. What we want is them back and feeling like they can do that in a way that meets their needs,” he said.

Lioy has introduced perks for those then taking on the extra load for their colleagues who are away, more explicitly paying them for additional responsibilities. “We have a policy in place, firm policy where it’s called responsibility allowance. For example, I’m chief people officer, right? So if I go out for a health reason or to take care of my mother for a long period of time, and my VP of North America steps up to serve in my role in addition to their role, they’re going to get a 10 to 15 percent responsibility allowance on top of their current wage to cover that duty. Or they’re going to get a responsibility bonus at the tail end of it,” he said.

Fair and square.

Address one of the thornier issues: how to make things equitable for caregivers vs. non-caregivers.

“One of the things we’re looking at is it’s been interesting to me how our vendors have expanded their offerings,” said Nelson. “We continue to work with Bright Horizons. They offer childcare backup. Before the pandemic, that’s all they offered. And that was just a benefit that we offered to everyone at the firm. But you really only took advantage of it if you had small children. And now they offer adult care. They offer pet care. And so it’s allowed us to be more equitable in the benefits that we’re offering, because you don’t have to just be this one subset to really use them.”

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