(Second in the 3-part series)
Our backyard crowd meets for lunch on Tuesday. Mike is a few minutes late as he took a call from an agency he hopes will finally have someone they can hire to help with his dad. It’s been over three months, and they are still waiting due to the staff shortages of professional caregivers. The conversation continues.
If you missed A Unique Perspective for Employers on the Caregiving Crisis (First in the 3-part series) – If It Doesn’t Exist, How Can It Be “Broken?” you can read it HERE.
Since COVID-19, awareness of the aging caregiving crisis has heightened business innovation. Many entrepreneurs are entering this emerging market, and most are using a model from the past that suggests that this role is short-term and there are adequate resources to support employee-caregivers and caregivers in general.
The raw truth is that no organized aging baby boomer caregiving structure exists. Improvisation is happening, not necessarily addressing the root cause. Employers need healthy, happy, productive, and motivated people to run the business. Employers face a tremendous threat to their workforce continuity.
As the new workforce majority is challenged by caregiving, we must look at the indirect impact of the healthcare-at-home crisis. Every caregiver works with 5-10 others, and the issues become contagious. Team leaders are ill-equipped to provide business advice and counsel. They aren’t sure what is okay to say or how to deal with the spillover of caregiving stress into their work environment.
The scope and scale of 70 million aging baby boomers have impacted every workplace.
The med tech and healthcare-to-home movement is driving the trajectory of employment protection down, employers’ investments in skills are being lost, and long-term caregiving removes employees from the workforce, especially lower wage roles and in underserved communities. Efforts to build the skills for the future will start at a reduced organizational intelligence level.
There is just no infrastructure to support families or the workforce. It just doesn’t exist! Tom, Mike, Sandy, and Nancy have had the same experience spending hours looking for resources.
Mike said, “the resources that do exist are well hidden or tell us we need to deal with the problem, accept it as normal or deal with our feelings and behavior – like a stress management tool for me is somehow the key to getting my dad the care he needs and making it so my brothers and I can still work! We need to build it!”
We are in a massive transformational period. Leaders just need to accept that the Aging Caregiving System is not broken – it doesn’t exist!
That’s good news.
Collectively, we can build the values and goals for successful living, working, and caring with effective management systems and a skilled and satisfied community and home care workforce.
Jeannette Galvanek, Founder and CEO of CareWise Solutions, has been in this exact situation as a Fortune 50 executive, a mom to daughters with special needs, and a caregiver for aging parents. She has taken on the challenge of addressing the needs of employers to retain and grow the skills of their employees, help all teams understand and manage this baby boomer demographic dilemma, and support employees in meeting their caring family roles, not doing nursing jobs for the healthcare industry.
“Face it, most employees want to keep their jobs, income, and relationships. If they wanted to do nursing roles, that would have been their career path. Most peers who feel the disruption of their work caused by unexpected caregiving demands want to be empathetic but do not like it when they feel their needs are second to caregivers, especially when their performance is based on team outcomes,” says Galvanek.
The redeployment of family caregivers from employment in their job of choice doesn’t seem to be a smart labor strategy.
We are at a turning point. Employers and employees must consider the currently defined aging caregiving role as antiquated.
They have a decision to make.
Many will hope that this alternate thinking is wrong, ignore the labor issues, ignore the profitability challenges, and stay neutral to see what others do… focusing on employees being there to provide care vs being caring family members. Absorb the cost of care-related disabilities as illnesses, accept less productivity, and ignore the bottom-line impact of increasing successful litigation, team member dissatisfaction, and customer satisfaction.
OR
Take an active role in equipping employees to be caring families with wellness, work and care education, life planning supports, and access to the right resources. Reclassify the caregiving and employment challenges as distinct issues with different solutions. Stimulate corporate staff to rethink the employees’ long-term needs for benefits such as long-term care insurance. Create corporate goals that build new capacity across the entire business. Establish the business performance standards that will drive all employees, managers, and executives to measure the outcomes in building a healthy, high-performing, and caring climate in every operation. This is not a benefits program. This is organization development.
The preponderance of caregiving products and services available to companies and individual caregivers focuses on helping people become better caregivers, not maintaining their careers.
Employers trying to support caregivers on their teams tend to take one of two approaches.
Employer Approach #1:
“Our aim is to ensure employees feel that our company supports their work/life balance. We offer great policies that permit employees flexibility to be at home and provide care and 12-week partially paid leaves of absence. Our EAP provides access to a wellness program and mental health support.”
Employer Approach #2
“We aim to support employees’ interests in retaining their health, jobs, income, and careers, and the ability to be there when their family needs them. We provide work and care management education to all our team members, emphasizing proactive planning and simplifying access to hundreds of resources for care management. Our managers are expected to be equipped with new skills as we build an operating climate supporting good health, high performance, and sensitivity to the extreme challenges of caregiving.”
What is the Difference Between the Approaches?
Since our society sees caring for aging parents as a “family” or “personal” problem, solutions are single points of intervention such as case management, employee assistance, and wellness apps. The stress and burnout of an average of 5 ½ years as a caregiver needs a workforce growth strategy across every industry, building, corporate/employee longevity and building the skills needed for mutual success.
Connectivity and integration are lacking for customer-focused outcomes (family), cost savings, and quality of life for those needing care. Cross-functional technology and cross-industry collaboration is needed.
Approach #1 is designed to make employees better caregivers. It is reasonable on the surface, except that it is at the expense of their careers and the stability of the organization’s workforce – indeed, the nation’s workforce. Employees rate work-life balance as one of the top three expectations of employers, how does any employer address that expectation in an aging and caregiving-intensive society?
“The most common comment I hear when I talk to executives is, ‘I never thought of it like that.’ C-Suite executives, most of whom have been caregivers to aging parents themselves, seldom consider the broader impact on their workforce! They are measuring caregiving program effectiveness and short-term employee satisfaction, which is essential, but there is a massive employment issue that must be addressed.
We are currently welcoming a million lives into our CareWise Solutions Community. I’m pleased they recognize the CareWise Solutions™ approach as unique, yet, I am advocating for a change in the perception of the caregiving crisis to a workforce crisis.
I am calling on employers to investigate the healthcare at home and community plans. Ask yourself if this strategy will preserve employment in an aging society. If not, what will you do differently tomorrow?”
Jeannette Galvanek, Founder and CEO, CareWise Solutions
Mike, Tom, Sandy, and Nancy have now created a Tuesday evening group of business leaders who are learning about each other’s work and how they can support other employers in advocating for the quality of life, work and care in our nation… to preserve employment in an aging society.
They asked that I create a regular forum for these discussions to occur more frequently and with expert guidance. Let me know if you would like to join our sessions by emailing me at Jeannette@CareWiseSolutions.com.
Join us for the next in the series – Coming Soon
A Unique Perspective for Employers on the Caregiving Crisis (Third in the 3-part series) – We Cannot Redeploy our National Workforce Without Dire Consequences!
If you missed A Unique Perspective for Employers on the Caregiving Crisis (First in the 3-part series) – If It Doesn’t Exist, How Can It Be “Broken?” you can read it HERE.
When your leadership team is ready for new perspectives on the workforce crisis fueled by the caregiving crisis, start with a FREE introductory conversation with Jeannette.
CareWise Solutions-org is a non-profit educational organization. Our focus is to activate a generational shift in line with the Baby Boomer Generation’s aging, life, and care expectations.
Your $500 tax-deductible donation funds research and product development to support employers and employed caregivers. You receive a PDF copy of the eBook The 3rd Wave of Care – an in-depth analysis of issues and associated challenges of chronic, evolutionary caregiving change.
Please visit CareWiseSolutions.org and ask if our Caring Place HUB app and education will support your business today. We hope the answer is yes!
