Steve Koepp: Hi everyone. I’m Steve Koepp, editor and co-founder of From Day One, our Forum on Corporate Values. Welcome to today’s webinar. It’s about the untapped power of caregiving, benefits, unlocking productivity and retention. Now, before we get started for today’s attendees, and that’s you, we have some complimentary VIP tickets for available for one of our virtual conferences.

It’s coming up on July 16th, and it’s about navigating the new landscape of employee benefit solutions. What was once a fairly standard set of offerings has blossomed into myriad point solutions. Many of them are beneficial to workers, yet they create a daunting task for benefits leaders to evaluate and to adopt them.

So, we’ll be asking what new approaches are benefits leaders taking to designing comprehensive benefits packages? I’m putting a link in the chat space right now to access complimentary VIP tickets for that virtual conference. Including access to the whole day’s activities. I hope we’ll see you there.

Now, today’s session is about the untapped power of caregiving benefits, unlocking productivity and retention. Did you know that 73% of employees are juggling a hidden second job? It’s caregiving. Whether it’s caring for an aging parent, a child with special needs, or a spouse with a health condition, millions of employees are struggling to balance their professional and personal responsibilities.

The result is increased stress, decreased productivity, and higher turnover rates. Despite this challenge, many organizations overlook caregiving as a critical workforce issue. So, in this session, we’ll learn how to enhance benefits. We’ll learn about flexibility and workplace support that can help you retain your top talent.

Today’s webinar is presented with support from Homethrive. I’ll tell you a bit about them. Homethrive is the only digital first caregiving benefit that supports every employee across every care need, from highchair to a rocking chair before life’s challenges impact work or well-being. Whether it’s a navigating a child’s ADHD diagnosis, managing a parent’s Alzheimer’s care, finding backup childcare, or dealing with a recent loss, each employee receives personalized support that evolves with their needs to reduce the time and the cost and the stress of caring for loved ones. Homethrive is the infrastructure behind working families. It’s intelligent, hands-on, and it’s available 24/7.

Now, a few quick logistical items and we’ll get started. This webinar is being recorded, and you can find a link to it on demand in an email that’s coming in about 24 hours. That email will have info on how you can get professional development credits from this session.

From the Society of Human Resource Management and the HR Certification Institute, we’ll have a written account of the conversation on our [email protected]. Now, for you all today, 45 minutes into the webinar, we’ll have a Q&A session, and that’s for you. You can submit your questions anytime using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen.

With all that said, let’s meet today’s speakers. Moderating the conversation will be Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, a From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her stories have appeared in The Economist, the BBC, Washington Post, and Business Insider among many others, and she recently won a Virginia Press Association Award for Business and Financial Journalism.

Emily, welcome and please take it away.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza: Thanks Steve. Welcome to all of our panelists. This is going to be a really good discussion. I’ll let our audience know, as we were prepping for this, I was learning stuff in the prep call with these folks. This will be very much worth your while. Before I start asking these folks questions, I’m going to have each of you introduce yourselves. Tell us who you are, and what you do at your organization.

We’ll start with Erin Fitzsimmons.

Erin Fitzsimmons: Hi everyone. It’s great to be here with you today. My name is Erin Fitzsimmons and I am the Global Head of Talent Attraction at TE Connectivity. TE is a global industrial technology leader. With a broad range of connectivity and sensor solutions across many different industries.

And we have presence in over 140 countries and about 85,000 employees worldwide. Outside of work, I keep busy. A part of the reason that I was very interested to be part of this panel today, my husband Brendan and I have three children. Kira, who’s six, Jackie, who’s three, and Owen who’s 10 months.

So looking forward to the discussion today.

Emily: Thanks, Erin. Arturo.

Arturo Arteaga: Hello, everybody. Very nice to be here with all these folks. My name is Arturo Arteaga. I’m the Vice President of Total Rewards Experience at VCA Animal Hospitals. VCA is the largest veterinary company in the U.S. and in the world with around 30,000 employees.

And I’m very happy to be discussing a topic that is very close to us because we have 80% or more of women in our workforce. So it is a significant stress for them. So thanks for inviting me.

Emily: Welcome, Dave Jacobs.

Dave Jacobs: I’m Dave Jacobs, the co-founder and CEO of Homethrive. About seven, eight years ago I was a senior executive at Healthcare Company and I became a family caregiver overnight, and it was incredibly overwhelming and challenging.

I didn’t know where to go, what to do, what to ask. I gained 25 pounds in six weeks. My wife suggested leave of absence, and that kind of experience led me to leave my kind of corporate job to start Homethrive, really to support family caregivers and what we’re going to talk about today to reduce that work, worry, and stress as people navigate many of life’s challenges, which no matter what our best intentions are, it’s the way life goes.

There’s a lot of different kind of things that people need as family caregivers. Very important. And that’s what we kind of are here to serve. Phyllis?

Phyllis Stewart Pires: Hello everybody. Phyllis Stewart Pires. And I’m the Associate Vice President for an organization within the Stanford Human Resources community called Employee Support Programs and Services.

And it’s basically a well-being focused organization. So we oversee our mental health, our wellness, work life, childcare, distributed work, many of those things brought together. And I have worked throughout my career as I’ve raised three children. I’m now in a different era than Erin. I’m an empty nester, watching my three children become young adults, so a slightly different time, but still a time with the adult caregiving responsibilities and things like that.

Emily: This is still a topic. Very important. Thanks, Phyllis. Thomas.

Thomas Adrian: Morning or good afternoon. I’m Thomas Adrian. I’m the Senior Director over Human Resources at Sheppard Mullin. We are a Global 50 Law Firm with over a thousand attorneys, 16 regional offices in north America, Asia, Europe, with 10 different practice groups and we just had about 2200 total lives, so rather large for a law firm.

Emily: Welcome to all of you. Let’s get right to it. Let’s talk about caregiver supports. Let’s start here: why are caregiver benefits becoming a more important part of employer supports? I’ve been writing and reporting about women in the workplace since 2019. This has never not been a part of that world, of that discussion.

It seems to be increasing in importance. Phyllis, are you also seeing this? Why do you think this is the case? Why is this a perennial topic?

Phyllis: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question. So I’m going to start with a great quote from Rosalynn Carter that I think sums up this topic pretty well, which is “There is only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.”

So I think that speaks to the importance on the individual level. But there are several macro forces at play impacting our workplaces, making caregiver benefits ever more important as employers think about the pipeline of workers, retention of talent and intellectual property, pipeline development, succession, et cetera.

And those are the U.S. workforce is shrinking as birth rates decline. So it’s going to be ever more important that those who have caregiving responsibilities, who need to or wish to stay in the workforce, have the support they need. The caregiving infrastructure in our country is completely broken, and it’s not showing any signs of being fixed by some sort of national decree anytime soon.

The cost of what care there is has become basically unaffordable to many segments of our population. People are staying in the workforce longer as retirement accounts shrink and longer lives are providing people with the opportunity for longer and perhaps second or third careers. But this means that they need solutions for their care.

Caregiving needs, say for a spouse or an aging sibling, or maybe their own parents. The caregiving labor force is shrinking dramatically as these jobs often don’t offer a living wage. And so, when you combine all of those with the fact that during the pandemic, the curtain on caregiving got ripped back. I think employees are looking for ways to support their employees in different ways relative to these kinds of benefits than we’ve seen in the past.

Emily: Thanks, Phyllis. Dave, what are you seeing here? Why has this continued to be a priority for employers?

Dave: I think probably for all the reasons Phyllis said and said them very well, I think they continue to be a priority. I think the other thing is, as we started off, we talked about this as being, when you think about caregiving, that’s the way we started.

Even we thought about it supporting kind of aging loved ones, which is an important component. But we think about really caregiving as everything. I think as we said in the beginning, the highchair to the rocking chair and beyond.

So that’s everything from childcare, backup care, people with neurodiverse challenges, especially children navigating ADHD to autism. And then you’ve got adults who have different diseases themselves or spouses, and then of course aging parents. And then after somebody passed away, and we even look at the pet care as part of the caregiving continuum in there.

When you look at that range, it really touches everybody. It doesn’t discriminate based on education, socioeconomic means and whatnot. The other thing I would just add to what Phyllis said is, unfortunately, the resources that may be available are very hard to find.

They’re confusing, they’re very localized. And so it’s not so easy, even if you have the will and knowledge to be able to kind of find the support you need if it’s out there. It is becoming more expensive, and most of it is private pay, which is really unaffordable for many people. And so it’s really becoming a big issue and it inevitably affects somebody’s work performance in life because it’s impossible.

Most of the things related to caregiving have to be done during the traditional workday, of course. Now, as Phyllis so perfectly explained in the beginning, everyone is a caregiver or will need a caregiver. So we know that for anyone on this call, there are caregivers in their workforce, maybe more than they realize or have accounted for.

Emily: Dave, how do employers know if they have a caregiver support problem? What are the signs that a workforce or maybe even an individual worker needs more help than they’re currently getting?

Dave: It’s a great question. Because of just the numbers, we believe most organizations, and more importantly, the employees there need more support than is generally able to be provided, especially by even very well-intentioned traditional EAPs and things of that nature, which generally provide lists of things and maybe one or two sessions just needs a deeper, more sustained kind of effort over time.

But some areas where it can show up, it’s really something. Historically people have suffered in silence. They’ve wanted to talk about caregiver support and family caregiver issues outside of childcare. And now it’s becoming more mainstream, especially as more leaders, especially including the people in this call, talk about it more openly, not only what the organization needs, but possibly their own kind of needs in that process.

So there very much is this kind of need. You start to see it in employee resource groups manifesting itself. You’ll start to see it in the leave management and kind of the absence management areas where one of the reasons people are leaving is because of caregiver needs. And well, in some cases that’s necessary.

In many cases with the right support, people can stay in their job, which is what they want. It’s good for the organization and they don’t have to use that valuable resource for this purpose. And so if your people start listening and create a little more of a forum for it, I think they will start to hear the needs of it.

People taking time away, confusion, and the stress really underlies a lot of the mental health and stress related things People talk about how one of the underlying causes is caregiving and just creating a little bit of a space for people to talk about those things will start to really surface them if they’re not aware.

Emily: I’m glad you brought up the notion of suffering in silence. Creating an environment is certainly something we’re going to talk about a little bit later in this hour. So how can employers actually make an environment where folks don’t feel like they have to do that, where they don’t feel like they have to keep it all in and then maybe leave.

Phyllis, would you like to weigh in on something here?

Phyllis: I was just going to add that I think one of the places that we need to be conscious of and look for these kind of impacts is in our pipelines. So as people are often offered opportunities to move from, say, individual contributor to manager, manager to director, director to VP, sometimes they will decline those opportunities if they either have a really stable caregiving situation and don’t want to disrupt that, or they see something on the horizon and are concerned about what they will have as their supports when it comes to that, or they’re in the throes of it.

So it’s just a place where I think particularly the HR community needs to be dialed into and tuned into how that’s showing up.

Erin: Yeah, I think that’s a great point, Phyllis. You know, I’ll reflect on, I’ve been at TE 13 years now. It was my second big job after college, and I remember sitting there early in my career saying there, okay, there’s women at the top right, but none of them have children.

And I knew that that was something that I wanted. So in my head, I was already thinking, will I be able to stay here longer term because I don’t see it now? That really evolved over time. I will tell you, you know, the men and women we have in our C-suite, I think almost all have children. And more than one for the most part.

So that’s really evolved over time. But to your point, I mean, that was going through my head very early in my career here.

Emily: Arturo, what’s on your mind?

Arturo: Let me be a little bit more dramatic than that. So we are just coming from a pandemic. And in that pandemic it was demonstrated that unfortunately women are still the person that takes care not only the children, but they care about the aging parents or brothers and sisters.

And it’s not only about letting opportunities go, it’s in many cases they have to drop the job to go and be full-time caregivers. If we will have some kind of support for those people, maybe they will continue in the workforce. So it’s not only about losing opportunities, it’s also about losing the dream job or sometimes just losing everything or letting everything go to become a full-time caregiver.

So that’s not only a matter of health and wellness, it’s also a matter of equitable opportunities for everyone.

Emily: Of course what all of our panelists are describing is the results of a general lack of social supports coming from the public sector, right? There aren’t a lot of government programs that help people stay employed as caregivers.

There’s what FMLA provides, job holding leave for some workers, but it doesn’t pay them. So there’s just a general lack of support in the United States for caregivers.

Arturo, let’s go back to you. How do you close those gaps in the public support system? Where can an employer come in and just be like, “Hey, these are the few things that we can provide that you’re not currently getting?”

Arturo: Yeah, it’s a tough question because you cannot provide for everything. There should be a financial sustainable benefit, and providing for everything is very difficult when there is no support across the government or across the family. The best we can do at this moment, at least in terms of financially sustainable part, is to provide backup care.

Meaning backup care is when we are providing our associates the support they need when their network is not working, if their family is not taking care of their kids because that’s the usual thing, or taking care of the aging parents. Having that backup care is, at least in an emergency situation, something that they will be able to use in an emergency or in a one time or maybe two times per month situation.

But closing the gap for everything, it would be very difficult because it’s not only about providing the benefit, there is no infrastructure, there are not enough caregivers out there to cover for the demand, and those that are there are expensive. So it’s a systemic problem that we need to address.

Together, the companies, the government and all the people.

Emily: Phyllis, what would you add?

Phyllis: Sure. So we have taken the opportunity to build some onsite childcare centers at Stanford. And part of the reason that we’ve done that is as sort of a small city, we know the impact that we have on the communities around us.

And so we felt that contributing to the supply of care that is available was an important way for us to show up in the community. Now, not every organization is large enough, resourced enough to make that kind of opportunity happen. But I think that that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways that we can all be positively contributing to this challenge.

And so, for example, I think there’s more and more companies realizing that many of the childcare operators in their community were negatively impacted by the pandemic and they need support. And sometimes you can offer that in exchange for access to care, things like that. There’s also more companies finding ways to engage in some creative public private partnerships or get involved in community-based consortiums.

And so I know that employees are becoming less willing to accept that we can’t build a center reason for an employer not getting involved in caregiver support. So it’s just, I think a need, to be as creative as we can about how we can positively contribute to the public support system, since we know that answer is not coming from a national level anytime soon.

Emily: Dave, you want to quickly weigh in?

Dave: It’s one thing that Arturo and Phyllis had said, part of it is these systemic challenges are very real. Our view is helping people navigate and basically coach them to find what is available and what is possible. For themselves and especially for if they have aging loved ones who have their own insurance plans, many of which do, and to try to at least provide as much access and transparency and availability to those things, many of which can be, at least at a deferred cost.

It doesn’t solve the issue, it doesn’t, but to be able to help with that, and even on the childcare side, we’ve taken the approach of most organizations don’t have the wherewithal or the will to build their own. There’s 200,000 licensed individual facilities and by facilities it’s usually in somebody’s home and they are licensed.

But they have a business challenge of how do they get accessibility and visibility to people, and so we’ve tried to basically create a network where we can get access to them and make it available. And if companies want to subsidize it, they can. And then also to find a network, build a network of over a million caregivers who are interested, who by themselves don’t know how to find enough work.

We can help them do that to try to bridge some of those things. It doesn’t solve those, but to try to give more accessibility and then to help people navigate. So it’s not really hard to find these things over time and figure out how to apply for different waiver programs and such.

Emily: I like that, Erin and Arturo, you both brought up this idea of women being able to progress in the workforce and move up in the ranks despite being caregivers, which historically and still currently for many, is a massive barrier because women are overwhelmingly taking on the bulk of caregiving duties and household duties still in the United States and globally.

That’s a huge hindrance to a lot of women’s careers. Thomas, law is a field where it takes a lot of hours and a lot of presence to climb, to move from associate to partner. How do you ensure caregiver status doesn’t impede career growth in your organization?

Thomas: Yeah, so in the law firm space that is beyond critical. We truly do value this benefit.

I think that we offer it globally to all of our employees, not just our attorneys, because we really have to have the overall culture that we want to be able to support it. We do have a women’s lawyer group. We have all of these different support models that are in place. I think we see it even more than regular industries because of the partnership model, where we really want to maintain that gender equality between male and female.

It is a little bit harder just because of the navigation, but you know, here we do extend all of the caregiving to across all of our wellness platforms, to the entire family, which really we’ve seen such a difference in that model. It’s a little bit, I will say generous, but it really has paid off on the bottom line.

Emily: So, except meaning extending beyond being just a caregiver to a child, just any, anybody they need to care for in the family. Am I understanding you correctly?

Thomas: Correct. So not only that, but we also extend it far beyond just the employee. So all across our wellness platform, everything is available to you and your extended family.

And we won’t define the word family, right? So if you live with your brother and they need help, or it’s their child that needs help, we’re going to extend to them. We don’t limit the caregiving, we don’t limit the assistance because if you are concerned about someone who you define as family, it’s going to come back and affect your work product.

So we have a much further extending platform.

Emily: Yeah, that’s exceptional. Something of course, that a lot of these caregivers need is flexibility just in where they perform their work, when they perform their work, needing to take someone to doctor’s appointments or other timed needs like that.

Erin, can you talk about offering flexibility to caregivers and in their terms?

Erin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So similar to what Thomas was sharing, we have our employee resource group. And actually a couple months before, or I guess the year before COVID hit, there was a tour that the champions of those went on across the globe to talk to our women in networking group and our young professionals to really find what’s needed and what’s holding you back in the workforce.

And the flexibility is really what came out of that. And so we actually created global flexibility guidelines around this. And it wound up launching, I think two weeks before COVID hit. So as an HR professional at that time, I was very happy because there was at least some guidance on what do we do and what we’re navigating right now.

But I think we’ve really come to lean on those flexibility measures for people. I was talking to my colleague the other day, who has two small children. She flexes her time to kind of take meetings in between the middle of the day. And then she has a large population in China, so after her kids go to bed, she hops on for a few more calls.

And there’s a lot of flexibility around that, especially being a global company too, because not everyone’s on your typical nine to five. So there’s a lot of support around that as well. And so I think those guidelines help tremendously and I think it’s also manager support. So it comes back a bit to culture, which I think we’ll continue to talk about.

But being able to speak up for what you need. I had my son in August. I came back to the workforce in December. There was a leadership trip to China in January. I said, there’s no way I can get on a flight to China right now. And my CHRO said, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. You can call in virtually if you want.

You don’t have to either. I know you’re not getting much sleep right now. So there’s a uniqueness to what people need and how manager support that, and that’s really variable. So we need to help coach and create that culture of openness as well as part of our role.

Emily: What you just said, Erin, just everyone’s needs are going to be so unique.

There’s going to be a company culture aspect and I think there’s also just going to be a broader global cultural aspect as well. You mentioned, you know, TE is Global, Arturo. I know VCA is one of the biggest or the biggest veterinary provider around the world, and you guys are at the beginning of your process of  continuing to build out your caregiver program.

So how are you thinking about building a caregiver benefits program that’s conscious of needs across borders and cultures and expectations and family structures?

Arturo: We have an additional problem that is 80% of our population is physically at the hospital. So they cannot work from home.

They cannot work in different times. So we have an opening hour and we have a closing hour. So they have to be in the place to attend the pets and the clients. So for them, it’s more difficult to cover those caregiving needs when they have to be physically in one place. So the focus is more around having some flexibility.

Again, most of them are hourly workers. It’s difficult to have flexibility when they’re hourly workers and depending on which state you have different laws protecting that. But as much flexibility we can provide, that’s good. We don’t have VCA yet, backup care that we implemented back in Mars, VCA is part of the Mars family.

So it’s part of the same company. So before I came to VCA, I implemented at Mars, what we call backup care, which was having 12 days of 12 different situations a year where you can use those resources. So the intention is to have something similar and it’s pretty much to cover those emergencies that people cannot prevent.

So that’s the focus is more affordable and it would be in terms of our business model would be more adequate to what we need to do because one person not at the hospital is impacting also the business we are doing.

Emily: Erin, what would you add?

Erin: Yeah, I would also add, the way we look at this a lot is local legislation.

So it’s very different how governments are set up to support across countries. I had my first daughter in Germany. I was living there at the time, so I had a doula kind of showing up at my house every day after I got home after birth for as long as I needed it. Much different than any guidance we get here in the U.S.

And here it was kind of, “Okay, go home, good luck, hope you get some sleep,” right? So, very different in what the needs are, but I did have needs in Germany too. There was a language barrier. It was really hard to get into. I was on local insurance, so it was really hard to get into a local pediatrician and find that.

So the guidance I had there through that doula network actually helped me to get those things. So I think it’s really important to understand what’s needed locally and where those gaps exist, and then try to supplement from there.

Emily: I want to remind our audience that in about 15 minutes, we’ll take audience questions for our panelists; there are already a lot in the Q&A box.

That’s where you can put them. And we’ll get to as many of those as possible. I’ve already earmarked a couple that we’ll definitely address. So if you have any questions for any of our panelists, use the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen and we’ll get to as many as we can. Now, Erin, you just described scaling or a global company and GR global reach and the challenges of administering these benefits across borders based on regional differences.

Thomas, I know, Sheppard Mullin has scaled a lot in the past few years. How are you scaling caregiver benefits? I know this is a challenge for a lot of employers.

Thomas: So Shepherd has really grown over the U.S. We’ve gained a huge east coast presence. So when I was tasked with this, one of the biggest things was to kind of remove some of the silos.

So great example of this is when we see someone go on leave, right? Leave is great, but leave is not enough. It is one benefit. So we automatically, when anyone picks up the phone about anything leave related, one of the first sentences is, did you know about our benefit supporting this?

Because while we’ll always support the leave and we are happy to do so, we want them to know that there is another option as well. So we do that in multiple different areas where the team is now interconnected so that you don’t have to go to one person or one group to find out about this. If you happen to bring it up in some situation, we’re just going to automatically reply with our benefit so that you know that it’s there.

Emily: Exceptional. Anyone else working on like, just the communications aspect of it? I know that’s benefits communication is something HR talks about all the time. It’s so challenging. Thomas?

Thomas: I’ll just add one more piece to that. So when we did implement caregiving, I call it a piece of the puzzle. So we require all of our vendors, and I say this loosely, to play nicely in the sandbox and Homethrive does a great job with this, so that we will do events and we’ll have everybody in at the same time so that Homethrive can cross refer to the right people.

Because while Homethrive is a great service, there are other services out there. So we need to make sure that everybody is focused together to have the best interest of our employees at hand.

Erin: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve loved that our benefit team has done is they’ve created certain communication packets for certain times in life or certain situations.

So there is a parental benefits guide and it kind of walks you through, “Hey, here’s all the types of benefits we offer.” And they tie in your mental health and well-being and therapy and things like that. If you want to have it, financial health. As you’re planning for expanding your family, how do you ensure that your financial health is where you need it and where you want it to be in the future?

So they target it to what they know you’re going through in that life change and make sure that you’re aware of how each of these benefits could kind of fit into that life change to help support you. So I thought that was a really nice way that they did it. They also did it for LGBTQ community to say, “Hey, here’s the things to think about if you’re adopting a child or moving into different things to support and just the way to think through our benefits and how they may help you in that situation.”

Emily: Dave, what would you add?

Dave: I would just add Thomas has been very progressive. Picking up also on what Erin’s thoughtful about encouraging and frankly asking Homethrive to work with other partners, which we are glad to do. I think more organizations should to do that. It’s a little more work, but they should put it on their partners to work together because it’s for everybody’s benefit, most importantly the employees.

And I think they’d be more willing, even when we’ve asked some other organizations, they have not been as I guess progressive in terms of saying we here are just making the introduction and then expecting us to do it. I think they would, organizations who are very stretched for resources might find their already existing partners very willing and more helpful than they might be otherwise to work together to put together. Like Erin, you’re talking about those whole programs.

Because they probably do involve a few different things. Let them work together, cross refer and help the employees, your colleagues kind of work through those things without being such a lift for the organization itself.

Emily: Arturo?

Arturo: Yeah. As responsible of making those communications. There are two pieces that we take into account.

One is that it has to be constant. So it is not one a year or twice a year, it has to be constant. Most of the cases, our associates will not pay attention to that. So because it’s too much, it’s a lot. So they will become experts on a specific benefits, what they need, the benefits. So a lot of the communication is where to find information, how to get access to that information more than actually sharing the information.

So Erin was mentioning about this package where I’m having a baby, so your parental leave is this or those are your benefits. And the same happens when you are on a caregiving leave or when you are having a life event, like a dead or something like that. But that’s one piece: constant communication.

The second piece is you have to engage them in that two-way communication. So making sure that they get engaged to drive that curiosity and learn more about the benefits, whatever the benefits are. And sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other. And the last one is to make it easier for them, make it easier to use technology, use the ways that they are used to.

A lot of our population, if not the majority, we are talking about millennials and Gen Z. So they are not talking to each other, they are not talking to somebody by the phone. They want everything in their phone. So the more you can get closer to them in the technology, getting an app or the information that is available to them in a way that they manage the day-to-day life is better for them.

So it’s more engaging for them as well. It is also generational. There are people that still want to talk to somebody. There are people that they don’t want to talk to anybody. So it is just adapting your ways of communication to your audience pretty much.

Emily: Let’s talk about the cultural piece. This is really important in which the employees can work in an environment where they know that they can take advantage of these benefits without penalty to their job, to the way they’re viewed by their colleagues. Phyllis, recommendations and advice on, on how to just make this a regular thing that people not only are welcome to do, but are expected to do?

Phyllis: Yeah, so I think we’ve touched on a few of these elements already, but it really starts with organizational empathy and really whether that’s leaders talking about their own experiences, just all those ways that we demonstrate that the organization recognizes the challenges and has empathy followed by managerial understanding and expectation setting around how we expect managers to show up.

Engage in that two-way conversation Arturo’s talking about that kind of piece. And then that’s followed by embedding it in actual work structures. And that is a responsibility of managers, leaders, and the HR community. Because what ends up happening is if we don’t think about how to apply this caregiving lens to all of the things, whether that is succession planning or learning and talent development or recruiting, all those pieces, then the chain gets broken as people go through the organization.

And then once those foundations are really well established, to Erin’s point, employees feel safer and more empowered to advocate on behalf of their individual circumstances and take advantage of the benefits that will serve them the most effectively.

And then we’re not any longer trying to solve a very individualized issue with one size fits all solutions. So that’s my culture pyramid.

Emily: Erin, what would you add?

Erin: Yeah, no, I think Phyllis has said it great. I would just add some of the ways I do this because as I’ve kind of taken on leadership roles, I take it as a personal stake in the ground for me to do this because I think as we see leaders doing it, then it makes it a lot easier for those that are direct reports, et cetera, to have the conversation of what they need. So for me, on Monday the camp my daughter’s in is coming out of school on summer break is nine to three.

Not the greatest timing. Going back to the support that’s there for it, I was on a call at nine and I said, “Hey guys, I won’t be on video. I’m talking to you in the car. Bringing my daughter to camp.” Like it had my peer on it, it had one of my direct reports on it. It had everyone, my calendar from six to 10 o’clock at night is blocked and says, time with my kids.

That’s what it reads on my calendar. So I think those practices. It’s what you do in what you do every day. It’s those little things that create that culture around it. And I think that’s what’s really important.

Emily: Gosh, yeah, just seeing, seeing your, even your, especially your direct boss, taking advantage of those things.

It just licenses the ability of other folks in the organization do it. It says it’s a safe place to take advantage of those things. Okay. So we are spoiled for choice with the Q&A. There are so many good questions. Before we go to those, y’all from the audience, keep putting them in there because we’ll get to a lot.

Before I go that way, I want to talk about budgets and ROI. These aren’t necessarily inexpensive benefits. And a lot of HR teams are seeing their budgets cut right now, just realistically that’s what’s happening. Dave, could you talk about some ways that HR and benefits teams can justify benefits maybe with ROI that they can take to the people who hold purse strings?

Dave: Yeah, I’ll give some perspective that we have across organizations, but this group is probably better suited and clearly very thoughtful about that. The impact it has, which just kind of to summarize, it talks about there is a productivity element, because the time that people have to spend looking for different services and things, or as Arturo said, if they have to be home with a sick child, they cannot physically be there.

That’s a real thing for organizations. There’s also a retention and attracting kind of talent standpoint. Caregiving has become the number two reason people are leaving the workforce after retirement, they’re not leaving forever. But it is not uncommon for people to say, “I’m going to leave for six months. I have to figure this out, and then I will figure out my reentry to the workforce.”

And so that becomes a big issue. It is a big source of mental health. I will say, at least in my opinion, we do believe it can help reduce healthcare costs because people neglect their own kind of chronic conditions and other things.

I neglected my own health. It’s a hard one to show to be honest for a chief financial officer who’s going to say, show me it on the p and l, that is a tough one. But I think in terms of utilization is another big element of things. We’ve been able to because it affects so many people and there’s a lot of ways to engage.

It can interact with other benefits you can get anywhere from, if you include childcare, it could be 25% of all employees are able to use it. And it’s not a perk that people do it because it’s just fun. They do it because they need it. And so those are the ways that we’ve seen people use it. It has to fit with their, you’ve heard here today, their culture, their priorities and their kind of workforce strategies and ways to show that it’s a being used and making an impact.

We’re starting to see some good results in the leave management area as well as a tangible way, but that’s a way to justify it. Not necessarily do it just because of that, but I’d be more curious. I think the group we have here today are the experts on that.

Emily: Thomas, what would you add?

Thomas: For us, we have a little bit more of an easy way to demonstrate the ROI on this because law firms work on a billable hour. I had one of our partners say to me, “By the way, did you hear of this Homethrive benefit?” Yes. I have heard of it. And said to me, “Hey, they’ve saved me so much time.” I’m like, that’s amazing.

I love to hear this. And they’re like, “I was actually able to build a client for that time and focus on my work.” And then I got a better answer because someone else was working on this for me. And I was like, giddy as a school girl in this, because now I have more demonstratable way of showing, not only did I get a better result for our partner, but they actually were able to bill a client more hours.

And we truly have our cake and icing too. So I know you can’t get more literal than just saying, I billed a client for that time.

Emily: Yeah. Phyllis?

Phyllis: I think this is one of those things that’s sort of the virtuous cycle because as you build the culture that encourages people to talk more about these situations that have been served by your benefits, then you can feed those stories directly to the people who are making decisions about resources.

So it’s a little bit of a tricky, you have to sort of stay in it long enough to start getting some of the stories like Thomas is talking about, and then your recurrent discussions about resources and budgets become a little bit easier, but it does feed on itself.

Emily: Okay. Let’s get some of our audience questions.

Oh, Arturo. Would you like to weigh in?

Arturo: No, I just wanted to put a little bit of perspective on that one. I think the difficult part is at the beginning, so how to demonstrate a return on investment because a lot of the information we just discussed about absenteeism, retention, growing, is something that we don’t have a lot of data that supports that.

So in order to build a return on investment, we need that data. So if we can gather enough data to really support that this will improve our attention, that this will improve our or reduce our absenteeism, it is better because you can show so it is not that easy to get that information unless depending on the industry is more difficult than in others.

But I think it’s critical for us as human resources to be able to start getting that information and that data and data driven decision.

Emily: Yeah, indeed. Okay. Let’s take some audience questions because these are very good. All right. Your first one comes from an attendee who asks this anonymously. They write “About half of our staff is administrative and clerical, and the other half works in production. It would be easy for us to be flexible with the administrative and clerical staff, but the company tends to shy away from doing or allowing anything that can’t be done for all employees.”

So we have an equity problem here is what this person is saying. What type of guidance would you offer companies with a split workforce regarding supporting employees in different roles in different ways?

Arturo, Erin, I think this is probably something you both, Erin, you want to start?

Erin: Yeah, sure. So we we’re a manufacturing company. So this one definitely hits home for us. So some of what we do is they look for the manufacturing population. What are some of the things they can do for that work there?

Because we know they’re on the production lines, they have to be there. It’s not that easy. So, what they do is they look at are there programs that they can put in place for quick response if they have to call out if a child’s sick or something like that, right?

So they do look at if there are different hours or timeframes that they can flex. Things that are more school-based for that location, right? Instead of having what shift could be within those time and hours. So it does look different. It isn’t the same.

It goes back to you can’t do exactly one thing for everyone because you have to fit it in the confines of what that job needs. And on the flip side, they don’t need to be on calls at six in the morning or seven in the morning or nine at night.

So there are some trade-offs for both of the roles and positions that we have in our environment. But that’s some of the ways that they tackle the more in-person roles that have to be there.

Emily: Arturo?

Arturo: Yeah, we don’t differentiate that. So we don’t differentiate people from in the floor and frontline workers versus the rest because anybody at the factory or at the hospital, they will call and report them sick or do whatever they need to do to take care of their child or their parents or whatever the difference is.

So if we are talking about caregiving benefits, if the person will be absent anyway because the person will be there, having the benefit is even better because that person can trust that somebody else will take care of their kid or their parents and will continue working.

So having that for the factory of the hospital is even more relevant that for the support or corporate offices, because they need the person there. In the other, they have more flexibility. They can work at night, they can work in different places, but in the factory, at the hospital, they need that support more than the other people need it.

So I wouldn’t differentiate that and I will offer the benefit to everybody.

Emily: Very helpful, both of you. Thanks. Okay. Your next question is from Erica and Erica’s question is in two parts, so we’ll take them individually first. Erica writes, “Thank you all for being here and for sharing how much this topic matters.”

So kudos to all of you. The first part of your question is this: how can we foster a cultural shift toward care as something we do together, a community or a village instead of something that falls solely on each family?

Phyllis, I mean, you described having onsite childcare. I wonder if this is a mentality that you subscribed to.

Phyllis: Oh, absolutely. I would say plus one to that for sure, and I think there’s many ways that you can do that. I mean, Erin gave some great examples of how, as a leader, she tries to show up in a way that demonstrates that this is a community impacting challenge, but it’s also a community solving opportunity as well.

Again, I think it’s also really important to think about how managers talk about this and providing the way that we can help managers work with their teams.

So one of the issues with flexibility that we often talk about is it should be addressed at a team level. So there needs to be an understanding among members of the team what the different challenges are that people have relative to their schedules and caregiving and responsibilities, so that you’re sort of starting to build that community cohesion, even at a team level.

And of course, I believe at a macro level, I would love for our country to think of this as a societal opportunity for us to recognize the responsibility that we all have for the future. So that’s my micro and my macro way of thinking about this.

Emily: Erin, what’s on your mind?

Erin: Yeah, the only thing I’d add is what I’ve seen in our company, the employee resource groups have been a great partner in driving some of this change across the organization.

So I’ve seen them drive the most innovative stuff, get the most funding, and kind of get leadership teams on board that it’s an important topic through the work that they’ve done and how they present it and show up as a community around it. So from my lens, that’s a great avenue to help drive it in your organization.

Because at least in my organization, they’re really looked at to some of the leadership around what’s needed and where are there gaps in our organization.

Emily: The second part of Erica’s question is also very good. Erica writes, “How can we help people in the workforce care about these benefits before they’re directly affected so companies feel more pressure to provide them?”

So it sounds like how do we get people to care about them, even if they’re not currently actively a caregiver? So maybe before your parents need care, before a spouse needs care, before you have children in your home, that kind of thing. Any advice on getting people caring about these, Dave, but before they’re actively using them?

Dave: Yeah, it’s interesting. That’s been one of our big kind of revelations and challenges is how do you avoid, and Arturo kind of touched on this, if you wait till it’s a crisis, it can be very hard and they may not have the time and bandwidth to find the resources.

So how do you get people in early enough and more often so you can help them along the way? But when there is a crisis and in the world of caregiving, depending on how you define it, they will happen. We think of it like gravity. It just comes on. And so one thing that we started to do is we broadened the range that’s helped.

Not everything is a crisis, but we also introduced a digital component to partly to address what Arturo said about some people want to talk to somebody and some people don’t want to talk to anybody. But also it lowers the barrier to participating. So you can ask a question, you can access it on your own for things that may not be as essential or as critical.

You just want to get some information. My mom needs, it’s a little hard when we go to the mall, and I’d like to get her a wheelchair I can take around. I don’t necessarily want to talk to somebody. I want to get the right recommendation and where to get it. Like those are things you can do digitally in our world.

And what we found is that gets people to use it more often and earlier so that when the more intense situations arise, they’re more familiar with us. In our case, they built trust and understanding of the realm of capabilities, and I think that model or idea could work across a variety of different things.

But if you just wait till it’s a crisis, it’s really hard. There’s so many things going on, people don’t know where to find it. So lowering the stakes and finding ways to meet people where they are, whether they work in an hourly role outside of a corporate office or in a corporate office or some other office setting as well.

Emily: Yeah, Arturo?

Arturo: Yeah, I would say in addition to the empathy that we are expecting from everybody, I think from the cultural perspective and even from the corporate perspective, creating that acknowledgement of what is a need for me. So I’m not a caregiver with what is a need for me to have these benefits for other people.

And we know that when there are benefits for the specific needs of people, sometimes the reaction is “Why do we have this for this group of people and not for us?” but in this case everybody benefits from that. Everybody benefits if we are in the factory and in the factory, we need somebody to be there.

We don’t have this benefit. Somebody will not be there because they have to take care of somebody else. And that is an additional work for the rest of the group. The same happens at the corporate office. So it’s creating that acknowledgement that there is something for everybody. When we have these benefits and everybody benefits from having them. Even though you may not be in the specific situation this moment, you will benefit because your partner or your coworker will be there for you as well.

So I think it’s a matter of cultural education.

Emily: I think that’s such a good point. Several years ago, I did a story about who’s taking on the work when folks are out on parental leave. And how a lot of companies were really forward thinking and giving months of parental leave, sometimes paid, even giving them on-ramps and off-ramps and on-ramps in coming into and out of the workforce for caregiving duties.

But they hadn’t thought about the workers who were there during the parental leave. Maybe they did a backfill, a temporary backfill. But they really hadn’t decided how those duties would be split, who would be responsible for things. Sometimes you can’t train up somebody in three months to do those duties.

And so the companies that were really forward thinking, this was years ago, the companies that were really forward thinking we’re just making that a part of how they built the leave policy. Okay, what’s our backstop plan? So for each role, some of them for instance, had just rules. How do you design someone’s leave plan?

And yeah, and those companies were really good. And it was great when people returned because the work had been done and the work had been done well, and so they didn’t come back to chaos on the other side of caregiver leave. Okay. this, this question comes from an anonymous employee who asks, “If utilization is low, how do you diagnose the root causes?”

Anybody want to weigh in on this? Has anyone had to look at this or gauge uptake? Arturo?

Arturo: Sometimes, if the utilization is low, it’s good news. Not only because it is cheaper for the company, but also because maybe it’s not that needed, but sometimes it’s I’m missing the communication. Sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know. So, from the company perspective, we need to make an effort to make sure that everybody’s aware that this is out there for them.

If despite that we have low utilization, that’s not a bad thing always. It’s just maybe the circumstance are not that bad at that moment. But we need to make sure that we are communicating properly, we are giving access, and we are pretty much allowing everybody to know and have access and just, I will take something Phyllis was mentioned, this has a lot to do with the management or the leadership of management.

Sometimes the situation is that managers are not willing or allowing people to take time or to take the benefit or to make sure that they are taking full advantage of the package of benefits that we have. So it’s an educational part for the managers. It’s a communication part for the associates, for the employees.

And it’s sometimes it’s just a portrait that we are not using that at all, which is not a bad thing. It is just, let’s make sure that we are covering the basics.

Emily: Dave, what would you add?

Dave: I think in our experience, communication and there’s a variety of things that have been talked about, is usually the fundamental, is the biggest thing, especially in caregiving, where people, they’re not as familiar outside of backup care maybe, or childcare, what it is and what’s available.

It’s not a as defined service if you will, and support as other areas. So that communication’s important. But the other thing I would just, it comes back to the ROI question before is, if somebody says, how do I fund this? Where we’re finding a lot of people in the beginning is they are looking at other programs that should have higher utilization and for whatever reason or not, I’m sure they’re good programs.

They just haven’t gotten and using some or all of those dollars to be able to fund a caregiving program where they can get more utilization and that people are limited in dollars, but also in resources in the organization, especially in HR departments. And finding the best return on that investment is one way they’re doing it for things where they’re trading out lower utilization programs for higher ones.

Emily: Thank you so much to all of our panelists. This has been a very productive way to spend an hour. I really appreciate all your knowledge and being willing to share it. I will hand it back to Steve at From Day One to close us out.

Steve: Well, thank you Emily, and thanks to our speakers. Thanks for taking the time to share your expertise and for being so candid about the challenges that people are facing and some solutions that they can pursue. Thank you again to Homethrive for their support and to all of you who participated today.

Now, before you all sign off, I’m going to put the link again in the chat space to some complimentary VIP tickets for our virtual conference. It’s coming up on July 16th, and it’s about navigating the new landscape of employee benefit solutions. So on behalf of my colleagues at From Day One, thanks for participating and stay well.