Why Your Workforce Needs a Caregiver Employee Benefit
As Human Resource departments work to give their benefits program an overhaul, the focus tends to be on three core areas: Physical Wellness, Mental Wellness, and Financial Wellness. So, where do you put caregiving benefits?
Caregiving used to be something people managed quietly after hours. That’s no longer true. A Harvard Business School report found that about 75% of U.S. workers have caregiving roles, and 80% say those care responsibilities undermine their performance at work at least some of the time. SHRM’s 2024 research found caregiving duties impact career growth for 42% of the working caregivers surveyed.
Caregiving Has Become an Employee Retention Issue
Bringing employee caregiver support to your benefits package means recognizing that providing specialized care for a family member is now a mainstream workforce reality, not a private side issue. For employers, this makes it a talent retention and performance issue. Your top performing employees are often the ones family members turn to in a crisis—they step up when needed. These are exactly the people you can’t afford to lose because your organization lacks caregiving benefits.
Catalyst’s 2026 survey of women who exited the workforce found 42% cited caregiving pressures and child care costs as the strongest factor in their decision to leave. When support is missing, employers pay through turnover, lost productivity and higher health costs.
Former U.S. First Lady, Rosalynn Carter’s, insight captures what your workforce data may not:
“There are only four kinds of people—those who have been caregivers, those who are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.”
Updating employee benefits and wellness strategies is about aligning policy with that universal reality.
How Caregiving is Hiding in Your Organization’s Data
Caregiving pressures rarely show up labeled as “caregiving” in your dashboards. They surface as burnout, unexplained absences, declining engagement or a high performer who suddenly turns down a promotion or submits a surprise resignation to provide care for a loved one.
On the surface, you might see: missed deadlines, late arrivals, frequent FMLA requests, or a spike in Employee Assistance Program (EAP) mental health, or even legal advice usage. Underneath, many employees are writing reports from hospital rooms, taking calls in the car outside a parent’s appointment, or logging in at night after managing dementia-related crises at home.
In one real-world example, a manager noticed a ten‑year top performer slipping out early on Fridays and arriving late on Mondays. What looked like attendance issues turned out to be a weekly road trip across states to accompany their mother to chemotherapy, and then caring for her afterward. Once the story surfaced, a short paid leave, then shift to remote work on those days kept a key employee in the role and restored their performance.
Research backs up how often this stays invisible. A Harvard study on caregiving at work found that over half of employers don’t track caregiving demographics at all, and many leaders underestimate or are unsure about its impact on performance. SHRM’s 2025 worker survey shows that about one in three employees choose not to disclose their caregiver status to their employer.
Monique Frahm, RN, Trualta’s own Care Coach Manager shares her experience as a caregiver for her mom.
Why the Caregiving Challenge is Accelerating for Employers
Even if today’s metrics look stable, demographics guarantee that caregiving pressure on your workforce will increase sharply over the next five to ten years. Family caregivers will be required to do more as healthcare and child care costs continue to rise. Without flexibility, this means more time off requested, and more employees facing medical leave because they don’t have time or energy to care for themselves.
The U.S. population is aging fast. All baby boomers will be 65 or older by 2030, and the Census Bureau projects that in the 2030s older adults will outnumber children for the first time. Pew Research finds that among adults with an aging parent, spouse or partner, 24–25% identify as caregivers, and lower‑income adults are substantially more likely to be in that role. That means frontline and hourly teams, where coverage is hardest to backfill, can be more exposed.
At the same time, paid care is more expensive to access because the demand is high and the supply is low. There is a shortage of professional caregivers from child care to trained home health aids.
Catalyst’s 2026 analysis links women’s workforce exits directly to the cost and logistics of care, not a lack of ambition. Other data shows nearly one in three working caregivers anticipate taking on new or additional caregiving responsibilities in the next five years, especially adult children caring for elders. Without an update to benefits and flexibility, more employees will be forced into impossible trade‑offs.
The Human and Business Impact of Unsupported Employee Caregivers
For employee caregivers, the impact is 24/7. They are effectively working two jobs: their paid role and an unpaid role that can include medication management, wound care, mobility transfers, personal care and navigating complex health systems with no formal training. Afterall, there is no professional development track for caregiving if you don’t work in healthcare.
SHRM reports that working caregivers are roughly twice as likely to say caregiving duties has harmed their physical and mental health, and 53% say it has negatively affected their finances.
For employers and HR professionals, those individual stories add up to real, measurable costs:
- Harvard Business School estimates U.S. businesses incur more than $1 trillion annually in turnover‑related costs, with caregiving a major driver.
- SHRM calculates that insufficient caregiver support leads to caregivers unexpectedly missing about 1.2 days of work per month, translating into an estimated $17.5 billion in lost wages monthly in the U.S. alone.
- A 2026 Pew survey found that among those caring for an aging parent, 39% report a negative effect on emotional well‑being.
When high‑potential employees quietly step back from advancement, turn down stretch roles, or leave the workforce entirely because caregiving feels incompatible with work, you lose future leaders and diversity at senior levels.
Tom Mudd, VP of Employer Markets recently shared how caregiving will catch up with your employees and impact business metrics that are often used to benchmark success across culture and hiring practices.
Three Shifts Your Managers Can Make Right Now to Support Family Caregivers
You don’t need a brand new benefit to start improving life for working caregivers. Many of the most powerful changes are cultural and start with frontline managers.
- Normalize the topic. When leaders and managers share their own caregiving stories like elder care after a fall, or managing a child’s new diagnosis, it signals that caregiving is not a performance issue. Caregivers chose not to disclose their status to their employer, often because they feared stigma or being seen as less committed.
- Change how performance conversations sound. Instead of only assigning tasks, managers can ask two simple weekly questions: “What’s the most important thing you need to get done?” and “how can I help?” That opens the door for an employee to say, for example, “My mom’s surgery is Wednesday, can we shift this deadline?” before work suffers.
- Encourage micro‑flexibility before people hit a breaking point. A few days’ deadline extension from a professor would have dramatically changed one caregiver’s university experience; in the workplace, that looks like shifting start times for morning radiation appointments, temporarily rebalancing caseloads, or allowing cameras‑off participation when a worker is caregiving from home.
Designing a Caregiver-ready Benefits and Wellness Strategy
Once culture begins to shift, it’s much easier to redesign benefits and wellness strategies so they actually match both the logistical and human needs of caregiving.
A caregiver‑ready strategy usually blends four elements:
- Flexible work design: Reliable options for adjusted schedules, remote or hybrid work where roles allow, and predictable shift planning so caregivers can coordinate appointments and respite.
- Modern leave policies: Family and medical leave that covers more relationships than a narrow definition of “parent/spouse/child,” plus short‑term leaves for acute care events so employees don’t have to choose between income and a parent’s hospital discharge.
- Targeted benefits: This can include confidence-building with skills training like safe mobility transfers, condition‑specific education to teach things like dementia communication tactics, or connecting caregivers with peer support so they feel understood and less alone.
- Manager enablement: Clear guidance on how to respond when an employee discloses caregiving, which benefits to reference, and how to balance flexibility with team coverage.
Updating caregiver benefits and wellness shows that your organization is compassionate and is willing to take care of their people beyond the 8-5. As employees grow their careers with you and their organizational knowledge expands, retaining them when they are caregiving becomes a competitive advantage. It’s hard on the culture and expensive for HR teams to replace your top performers. competitive advantage. It’s hard on the culture and expensive to replace your top performers.
References:
- Fuller, J.B., Raman, M., & Hintermann, F. (October 2024). Hidden Workers: The Case for Caregivers. Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work.
- SHRM. (2024). Care and Careers: Navigating Caregiving and Work Responsibilities. Alexandria, VA: SHRM.
- Catalyst. (January 2026). Caregiving Pressures Top Factor Pushing Women Out of the Workforce. New York, NY: Catalyst.
- Fuller, J. (January 2024). Healthy Outcomes: How Employers’ Support for Employees with Caregiving Responsibilities Can Benefit the Organization. Harvard Business School.
- Pew Research Center. (February 2026). Family Caregiving in an Aging America. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
