September 9, 2025 • 20 mins
In this episode of the HR Mixtape, host Shari Simpson sits down with James Atkinson, Vice President of Thought Leadership for the Society of Human Resource Management. They delve into the pressing issue of working caregivers, a topic that has gained urgency as over 50 million individuals balance professional responsibilities with caregiving for children, adults with chronic conditions, and the elderly. This conversation is particularly insightful as it highlights the evolving landscape of employee experience and the need for inclusive leadership in supporting caregivers, especially in light of the ongoing shifts in workforce demographics.
Listener Takeaways:
-
Learn how to identify the unique needs of caregivers within your organization.
-
Discover why flexibility in workplace policies can enhance productivity and retention.
-
Explore strategies for embedding a culture of support that benefits all employees.
Hit “Play” to gain valuable insights on how to better support working caregivers in your organization!
Guest(s): James Atkinson, Vice President of Thought Leadership, Society of Human Resource Management
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
You're listening to the HR Mixtape. Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel, well,
Joining me today is James Atkinson, Vice President of Thought Leadership
for the Society of Human Resource Management. James focuses
(00:25):
on identifying emerging trends and issues affecting the modern workforce, particularly
So this topic around working caregivers
is really fascinating to me. I have three children, as those
(00:48):
who have listened to the podcast for a while know. They're all grown now, but there
definitely was a time in my own life where I was trying to balance working
or not working, daycare or not daycare. And,
you know, as I've gotten older, now I'm starting to think about my parents and what
they might need. I know this is a relevant topic. It
has been for many years, but what makes it urgent right now as
(01:14):
Yeah. So first of all, the story you just shared is a
story that we hear a lot. In fact, more
than 50 million working caregivers are
in our current labor force and that's carrying
across different groups. So children, adults
with chronic care, as well as the elderly. And so
(01:36):
it's impacting so many in the workforce right now. And
for organizations, they've got to understand not
just that these people are here, but what the needs are, because
it's going to have a real impact on productivity. If
they're not supported well, it's going to have a real impact on their
ability to do their work well. It's
(02:00):
also going to impact whether or not they want to stay with your organization. And
retention is a huge issue, obviously, that many HR professionals care
about. So there's a lot of reasons why this is
a huge topic. It's one of the reasons why we focused
Well, and I'm starting to see even differences in
(02:22):
benefits and some of the things that are coming out of HR departments and
how we're thinking about flexibility different. You know, I think
the pandemic definitely opened our eyes to different types of flexibility for
caregivers. And I don't think that's changed, but it's complex. It's
hard to make sure that you are meeting your business objectives and
productivity and performance measurements and that kind of stuff. You
(02:44):
know, what are some of the workplace challenges that you've seen? You
know, I mentioned a few there, but like, what are the ones that are rising to the surface that
HR is really trying to tackle to still have
a workforce that meet their business objectives? Because at the bottom line, right, businesses
make money. And so we need to be cognizant of that as
Well, some of the biggest challenges we see from the perspective of
(03:07):
the caregivers themselves is when they tell us that it really
has a negative impact on their career at times, especially
if they're not supported well. We found that 42% of
working caregivers told us that their caregiving responsibilities have
had that kind of negative impact. And we see this in things
like that insufficient support, some
(03:30):
workplace stigma, we see it and just that unpredictable
interruptions to work. You go to work expecting the
day to look like something and then all of a sudden it looks
like something else and you have to, you as an individual, have
to be flexible. And then from an HR perspective, you
know, it's really about of what can be done to
(03:53):
support people again so that they can be productive in
their jobs. You noted the rise of
remote and hybrid work,
which we all jumped into, ready or not, about five or
so years ago, hard to believe. But with that,
what happened is it allowed a lot of organizations to
(04:15):
realize that they might be able to do this kind of work. And
while we've seen a number of organizations move back into the
office, it's imperative on HR
professionals working with their managers to figure out ways that
they might still be able to provide some flexibility as needed,
even if it's not part of the broader work model that's there.
(04:39):
Yeah. How have you seen in your data that
pressure on working caregivers affect
Well, one thing I will note is that if caregivers are
supported well, we don't see a drop off
in things like productivity. We don't see
(05:01):
differentials in retention or engagement. It's
when workers aren't supported that we start to
see some of those things. And I'll give you a couple of examples
here of what we're seeing. So one
is that, you know, one in four have had to reduce their
workload. in order to provide those caregiving responsibilities, one
(05:22):
in five have had to kind of just reduce the
hours that they're doing as well. In
fact, we see that if caregivers aren't supported,
they're missing on average 1.2 working days every
single month. And for one
individual, that may not seem like a lot, but if
(05:45):
you take that out across the labor force,
we actually see that that 1.2 working
days per month translate into about $17.5 billion
in lost productivity every single month just
(06:06):
How is HR tackling this? You know, I think of all the initiatives
that we have across all of our inclusive initiatives, right?
Caregivers are one group that we have to think about. What
are you seeing HR do to provide the type of
Well, the best HR functions are
(06:27):
first and foremost understanding who the caregivers are
and their organizations. I think historically we've spent
a lot of time thinking about caregiving as
the example you started with of you have children
and you have to you know, figure out how to balance work
and caregiving for those kids. And that still is
(06:51):
kind of the biggest percentage of
caregivers that we see. But we're seeing growing numbers
of people caring for adults with chronic conditions, growing
numbers of people caring for the elderly. And in fact,
we see about one in four in
the survey that we did who are doing multiple caregiving responsibilities
(07:13):
at the same time. So it might be a kid and
a parent at the same time. We often call that a sandwich generation. And
that's when these types of pressures
and challenges are really compounding on themselves. So first
and foremost, HR is understanding who that
is at their organization. and understanding what their
(07:35):
needs are and how that might differ across these different groups.
I think the second thing is really trying to think about what are the types
of benefits that you can provide and
making sure that matches with what are the types of
benefits that employees actually think will
be important. So one of the things is to really understand what
(07:58):
caregivers feel is important to them and making sure you're matching those
benefits accordingly. So, for example, you know, the number
one thing that those who are caring for the elderly say would be
super important is elder care services and
access to those. But only about 70% of organizations
provide that type of benefit to their employees.
(08:20):
And so there's a bit of a mismatch there in what is
needed versus what is provided. So organizations just
really have to understand where those gaps
Yeah. You know, when I was earlier in my career and
we were looking at, you know, some of the big names out there, right. Google, Netflix,
right. Some of those big tech companies. It was fascinating to see the
(08:42):
ancillary benefits they continue to add to their on-site campuses,
like daycare, like laundry service, like, you know, all those
different things. I have yet to hear of
a company doing elder care on
site and what an impact that could potentially have to this
population, you know, I'm Gen X, I'm right in that space where, you
(09:04):
know, potentially if my kids were younger, I might have that
sandwich scenario that you're talking about. So it really does force
the HR organization to think differently about what resources
Yes, yes, absolutely. And like you said, there's an
opportunity to think differently, especially
as we see the changes
(09:27):
in who we're typically providing care for as
well. We have fewer young people and
a growing elderly population. And so we
need to really get at the forefront of thinking about what that
Yeah, maybe it's not bring your child to work day, maybe it's bring your parent to work
(09:48):
day. Yes, maybe it is. That would be so much fun
for some people. I'm sure it might not be fun for everybody. How do
professionals, HR professionals start to think about leave policies
differently? So, you know, we have the government mandated things
like FMLA and, you know, ADA and those
types of things, but organizations can level those up just like
(10:09):
any other policy. What are you seeing in changes happening there
Yeah. I think people are just kind of rethinking
what's the difference between what you have to do to be legally compliant
and what you have to do to be competitive in the marketplace for
talent. And those are not the same
(10:31):
things. So we see organizations
saying, okay, we have to provide you this type
of lead, but we're going to provide you this additional
type. Or even more so just
an underlying culture of flexibility can
go a long way as well. I think the, the
(10:54):
idea that it has to be a kind of strict policy.
The best organizations I think are saying, you know what, we're going to empower our
managers to do the right thing. And we're going to empower them to
have conversations and say, Oh, you need to be flexible today.
You know, then that's great. We'll rearrange
(11:14):
your work so that you can get it done at this time in this
location. We're still going to hit our deadlines, but
you're going to do it in a way that allows you to accommodate what
you're doing. And that's not necessarily written as
a policy, but there's a culture that you
can really implement at your organization of saying, hey, we're going
to provide flexibility. And this isn't just for caregivers. This is for all
(11:37):
employees. Life happens. And if you have that
culture of, okay, we're going to work around that while
still delivering the outcomes that we're supposed to be delivering. I
think you're going to see in response that
that loyalty from employees to say, Hey, this
was a tough situation. I had that flexibility. I
(11:59):
was able to do it. So when I don't need that support, I'm
going to give that much more. And I'm going to want to
And that ties into discretionary effort. You know, I feel like
we haven't talked about that a lot over the last several years
because there's so much change in
how we think about the term engagement. And I was just talking about
(12:21):
this with somebody else about how Gen Z is coming into the workforce and
they have a very different perspective on loyalty
to an organization, engagement, and those kinds of things. So we
don't talk a lot about discretionary effort. But you hit the
nail on the head when you said like, hey, life happens. We're all human, you
know, like that narrative of, you know, feeling bad
(12:42):
for calling in sick when you have sick time available to you. Like, that's
wild. But we all have, I mean, I know most of the people I
know in my life have gone through that exact feeling of, oh, I
don't know if I should take this benefit because I don't know how it's going to, how
I'm going to be perceived. But it's like we all have life
stuff that happens. Exactly. So I love that concept of,
(13:06):
Yes, exactly. And I think once you, once you
have that embedded, uh, throughout your organization, then
the outcomes are going to come your way, right? You're
going to have those employees that are saying, Hey, you
care about me in the tough times. Like. I'm going
to put that extra effort in tomorrow, the
(13:29):
next day, the next week, et cetera. Because I
know that if another challenging time comes about, you
know, you're going to provide that accommodation. And, and again,
I think that to your point, it puts the human element
into all of this. And I think that's really important. And
(13:52):
Yeah, and it removes the kind of the bureaucracy of having to
follow a really stringent policy. You know,
what do you think is one particular benefit that
can get overlooked by HR that if we implemented
So I'm going to repeat what I've said before in that it
(14:13):
may not be a particular benefit that we go out and buy. I
think it is a little bit more of a push
towards workplace flexibility across the organization.
And so if we think about that as a benefit as
opposed to kind of the typical menu of benefits that we do. I
actually think that has the ability to
(14:35):
do a greater impact than a lot of
things that we can provide because
organizations are so different. to
say, hey, it's this one particular thing, that really
may not make sense for a given organization. The
concept of flexibility, the concept of embedding that in the culture, I'm
(14:57):
going to double down on that answer and just say, I think that is
really where we can see some powerful results
if we as HR are not just pushing
that from kind of from our end, but we're certainly supporting
and developing our managers and leaders to do that on their teams as
(15:18):
What do you say to the, to the leader who's working in
manufacturing, who's working in hospitality or
retail or restaurant where, you know, these are hourly
frontline workers and you have to have X number of staff on
the floor at all times. What does flexibility look like
there? Meaning how do we plan for it? Right. That's, I
(15:39):
mean, you still want to offer it. And the kind of caveat is
you don't actually know when you're going to need it. So how do we,
as a really good strategic partners to our businesses, build
I mean, it's a great question, right? Because a lot of times we
think about the flexibility of working from home, but you
(15:59):
can't work from home if your job requires you to be on site.
I think there's a couple of different ways to be thinking about that. One
is to make sure that you have a strong contingency
workforce. Right. So having access to,
you know, whether it's a company you work with that can provide temporary
(16:20):
workers in a, you know, in a short period of
time, I think that certainly is something that you
want to have some of that flexibility in your overall
workforce to be able to do something, something similar to
that for kind of a short term. But,
you know, a short-term flexibility versus long-term flexibility, I
(16:41):
think, is also something that you have to think about. And, you know, in the long term, you
may have to hire somebody in for a period of time, especially
if someone goes out on a leave that, you know, is something like
FMLA. But in the short term, to the extent
that you can provide a little bit of that ebb
and flow in your workforce, I think that's one of the key
(17:03):
areas to make sure you have on
And what a cool way to think about gig economy, right? And
gig roles. If you can think about creating those gig
opportunities for maybe somebody who works in a different restaurant, but they have all
the skills you need, right? Going back to like a more skills-based way
of looking at things. That is revolutionary. If
(17:26):
you think about really getting into that kind of mindset of
leveraging a gig economy that way, it had a huge impact.
And, you know, they have, they have the skills that you need and
may not have the hours that they want. Right. And so all of a sudden you're,
you're kind of providing them with more work opportunities and,
you know, you're filling that gap that, that you need in order to support one
(17:53):
Yeah. As we wrap up our conversation, James,
and you kind of look ahead at the future, and I've
asked this question before to a couple of people around like, you know, five years from now,
sometimes five years is really far away, as we know the pandemic has taught us.
But, you know, how do you see some of these evolving demographics really
changing the future of work with respect to caregiving? Because we know
(18:14):
that the boomer generation is nearing retirement.
Now, everybody's going to retire at obviously 65, but that's
changing. And so you have the complexities of knowledge
transfer and all the other things, but then you add in now this population of
Well, we actually did ask a question to
(18:37):
those who took this particular survey that was
a part of our caregiving research. And we found that one in five current
caregivers are expecting to take on new or
additional caregiver responsibilities for the elderly population
in the next five years. And about
13% or, you know, say one in eight who
(18:59):
are not currently currently providing caregiving of any sort are
expecting in the next five years to be providing care for
someone in the elderly population. So it's
not surprising. We know that across the next few
years, I think by about 2030, roughly one in five
adults will be six year old. And so that
(19:22):
is, that's the direction that we
as organizations need to be thinking about what does caregiving
for the elderly look like in terms of the support we can provide for
our while continuing to provide what we do for other
groups. That's the one that if we don't pay
attention to that in the next few years, we're going
(19:48):
Yeah. Well, James, this was a great conversation and I'll make sure to put in the
show notes a link to the research that Sherma has done on this topic because it's
so important. And I just appreciate you taking a few minutes of your day to
You're listening to the HR Mixtape. Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel, well,
Joining me today is James Atkinson, Vice President of Thought Leadership
for the Society of Human Resource Management. James focuses
(00:25):
on identifying emerging trends and issues affecting the modern workforce, particularly
So this topic around working caregivers
is really fascinating to me. I have three children, as those
(00:48):
who have listened to the podcast for a while know. They're all grown now, but there
definitely was a time in my own life where I was trying to balance working
or not working, daycare or not daycare. And,
you know, as I've gotten older, now I'm starting to think about my parents and what
they might need. I know this is a relevant topic. It
has been for many years, but what makes it urgent right now as
(01:14):
Yeah. So first of all, the story you just shared is a
story that we hear a lot. In fact, more
than 50 million working caregivers are
in our current labor force and that's carrying
across different groups. So children, adults
with chronic care, as well as the elderly. And so
(01:36):
it's impacting so many in the workforce right now. And
for organizations, they've got to understand not
just that these people are here, but what the needs are, because
it's going to have a real impact on productivity. If
they're not supported well, it's going to have a real impact on their
ability to do their work well. It's
(02:00):
also going to impact whether or not they want to stay with your organization. And
retention is a huge issue, obviously, that many HR professionals care
about. So there's a lot of reasons why this is
a huge topic. It's one of the reasons why we focused
Well, and I'm starting to see even differences in
(02:22):
benefits and some of the things that are coming out of HR departments and
how we're thinking about flexibility different. You know, I think
the pandemic definitely opened our eyes to different types of flexibility for
caregivers. And I don't think that's changed, but it's complex. It's
hard to make sure that you are meeting your business objectives and
productivity and performance measurements and that kind of stuff. You
(02:44):
know, what are some of the workplace challenges that you've seen? You
know, I mentioned a few there, but like, what are the ones that are rising to the surface that
HR is really trying to tackle to still have
a workforce that meet their business objectives? Because at the bottom line, right, businesses
make money. And so we need to be cognizant of that as
Well, some of the biggest challenges we see from the perspective of
(03:07):
the caregivers themselves is when they tell us that it really
has a negative impact on their career at times, especially
if they're not supported well. We found that 42% of
working caregivers told us that their caregiving responsibilities have
had that kind of negative impact. And we see this in things
like that insufficient support, some
(03:30):
workplace stigma, we see it and just that unpredictable
interruptions to work. You go to work expecting the
day to look like something and then all of a sudden it looks
like something else and you have to, you as an individual, have
to be flexible. And then from an HR perspective, you
know, it's really about of what can be done to
(03:53):
support people again so that they can be productive in
their jobs. You noted the rise of
remote and hybrid work,
which we all jumped into, ready or not, about five or
so years ago, hard to believe. But with that,
what happened is it allowed a lot of organizations to
(04:15):
realize that they might be able to do this kind of work. And
while we've seen a number of organizations move back into the
office, it's imperative on HR
professionals working with their managers to figure out ways that
they might still be able to provide some flexibility as needed,
even if it's not part of the broader work model that's there.
(04:39):
Yeah. How have you seen in your data that
pressure on working caregivers affect
Well, one thing I will note is that if caregivers are
supported well, we don't see a drop off
in things like productivity. We don't see
(05:01):
differentials in retention or engagement. It's
when workers aren't supported that we start to
see some of those things. And I'll give you a couple of examples
here of what we're seeing. So one
is that, you know, one in four have had to reduce their
workload. in order to provide those caregiving responsibilities, one
(05:22):
in five have had to kind of just reduce the
hours that they're doing as well. In
fact, we see that if caregivers aren't supported,
they're missing on average 1.2 working days every
single month. And for one
individual, that may not seem like a lot, but if
(05:45):
you take that out across the labor force,
we actually see that that 1.2 working
days per month translate into about $17.5 billion
in lost productivity every single month just
(06:06):
How is HR tackling this? You know, I think of all the initiatives
that we have across all of our inclusive initiatives, right?
Caregivers are one group that we have to think about. What
are you seeing HR do to provide the type of
Well, the best HR functions are
(06:27):
first and foremost understanding who the caregivers are
and their organizations. I think historically we've spent
a lot of time thinking about caregiving as
the example you started with of you have children
and you have to you know, figure out how to balance work
and caregiving for those kids. And that still is
(06:51):
kind of the biggest percentage of
caregivers that we see. But we're seeing growing numbers
of people caring for adults with chronic conditions, growing
numbers of people caring for the elderly. And in fact,
we see about one in four in
the survey that we did who are doing multiple caregiving responsibilities
(07:13):
at the same time. So it might be a kid and
a parent at the same time. We often call that a sandwich generation. And
that's when these types of pressures
and challenges are really compounding on themselves. So first
and foremost, HR is understanding who that
is at their organization. and understanding what their
(07:35):
needs are and how that might differ across these different groups.
I think the second thing is really trying to think about what are the types
of benefits that you can provide and
making sure that matches with what are the types of
benefits that employees actually think will
be important. So one of the things is to really understand what
(07:58):
caregivers feel is important to them and making sure you're matching those
benefits accordingly. So, for example, you know, the number
one thing that those who are caring for the elderly say would be
super important is elder care services and
access to those. But only about 70% of organizations
provide that type of benefit to their employees.
(08:20):
And so there's a bit of a mismatch there in what is
needed versus what is provided. So organizations just
really have to understand where those gaps
Yeah. You know, when I was earlier in my career and
we were looking at, you know, some of the big names out there, right. Google, Netflix,
right. Some of those big tech companies. It was fascinating to see the
(08:42):
ancillary benefits they continue to add to their on-site campuses,
like daycare, like laundry service, like, you know, all those
different things. I have yet to hear of
a company doing elder care on
site and what an impact that could potentially have to this
population, you know, I'm Gen X, I'm right in that space where, you
(09:04):
know, potentially if my kids were younger, I might have that
sandwich scenario that you're talking about. So it really does force
the HR organization to think differently about what resources
Yes, yes, absolutely. And like you said, there's an
opportunity to think differently, especially
as we see the changes
(09:27):
in who we're typically providing care for as
well. We have fewer young people and
a growing elderly population. And so we
need to really get at the forefront of thinking about what that
Yeah, maybe it's not bring your child to work day, maybe it's bring your parent to work
(09:48):
day. Yes, maybe it is. That would be so much fun
for some people. I'm sure it might not be fun for everybody. How do
professionals, HR professionals start to think about leave policies
differently? So, you know, we have the government mandated things
like FMLA and, you know, ADA and those
types of things, but organizations can level those up just like
(10:09):
any other policy. What are you seeing in changes happening there
Yeah. I think people are just kind of rethinking
what's the difference between what you have to do to be legally compliant
and what you have to do to be competitive in the marketplace for
talent. And those are not the same
(10:31):
things. So we see organizations
saying, okay, we have to provide you this type
of lead, but we're going to provide you this additional
type. Or even more so just
an underlying culture of flexibility can
go a long way as well. I think the, the
(10:54):
idea that it has to be a kind of strict policy.
The best organizations I think are saying, you know what, we're going to empower our
managers to do the right thing. And we're going to empower them to
have conversations and say, Oh, you need to be flexible today.
You know, then that's great. We'll rearrange
(11:14):
your work so that you can get it done at this time in this
location. We're still going to hit our deadlines, but
you're going to do it in a way that allows you to accommodate what
you're doing. And that's not necessarily written as
a policy, but there's a culture that you
can really implement at your organization of saying, hey, we're going
to provide flexibility. And this isn't just for caregivers. This is for all
(11:37):
employees. Life happens. And if you have that
culture of, okay, we're going to work around that while
still delivering the outcomes that we're supposed to be delivering. I
think you're going to see in response that
that loyalty from employees to say, Hey, this
was a tough situation. I had that flexibility. I
(11:59):
was able to do it. So when I don't need that support, I'm
going to give that much more. And I'm going to want to
And that ties into discretionary effort. You know, I feel like
we haven't talked about that a lot over the last several years
because there's so much change in
how we think about the term engagement. And I was just talking about
(12:21):
this with somebody else about how Gen Z is coming into the workforce and
they have a very different perspective on loyalty
to an organization, engagement, and those kinds of things. So we
don't talk a lot about discretionary effort. But you hit the
nail on the head when you said like, hey, life happens. We're all human, you
know, like that narrative of, you know, feeling bad
(12:42):
for calling in sick when you have sick time available to you. Like, that's
wild. But we all have, I mean, I know most of the people I
know in my life have gone through that exact feeling of, oh, I
don't know if I should take this benefit because I don't know how it's going to, how
I'm going to be perceived. But it's like we all have life
stuff that happens. Exactly. So I love that concept of,
(13:06):
Yes, exactly. And I think once you, once you
have that embedded, uh, throughout your organization, then
the outcomes are going to come your way, right? You're
going to have those employees that are saying, Hey, you
care about me in the tough times. Like. I'm going
to put that extra effort in tomorrow, the
(13:29):
next day, the next week, et cetera. Because I
know that if another challenging time comes about, you
know, you're going to provide that accommodation. And, and again,
I think that to your point, it puts the human element
into all of this. And I think that's really important. And
(13:52):
Yeah, and it removes the kind of the bureaucracy of having to
follow a really stringent policy. You know,
what do you think is one particular benefit that
can get overlooked by HR that if we implemented
So I'm going to repeat what I've said before in that it
(14:13):
may not be a particular benefit that we go out and buy. I
think it is a little bit more of a push
towards workplace flexibility across the organization.
And so if we think about that as a benefit as
opposed to kind of the typical menu of benefits that we do. I
actually think that has the ability to
(14:35):
do a greater impact than a lot of
things that we can provide because
organizations are so different. to
say, hey, it's this one particular thing, that really
may not make sense for a given organization. The
concept of flexibility, the concept of embedding that in the culture, I'm
(14:57):
going to double down on that answer and just say, I think that is
really where we can see some powerful results
if we as HR are not just pushing
that from kind of from our end, but we're certainly supporting
and developing our managers and leaders to do that on their teams as
(15:18):
What do you say to the, to the leader who's working in
manufacturing, who's working in hospitality or
retail or restaurant where, you know, these are hourly
frontline workers and you have to have X number of staff on
the floor at all times. What does flexibility look like
there? Meaning how do we plan for it? Right. That's, I
(15:39):
mean, you still want to offer it. And the kind of caveat is
you don't actually know when you're going to need it. So how do we,
as a really good strategic partners to our businesses, build
I mean, it's a great question, right? Because a lot of times we
think about the flexibility of working from home, but you
(15:59):
can't work from home if your job requires you to be on site.
I think there's a couple of different ways to be thinking about that. One
is to make sure that you have a strong contingency
workforce. Right. So having access to,
you know, whether it's a company you work with that can provide temporary
(16:20):
workers in a, you know, in a short period of
time, I think that certainly is something that you
want to have some of that flexibility in your overall
workforce to be able to do something, something similar to
that for kind of a short term. But,
you know, a short-term flexibility versus long-term flexibility, I
(16:41):
think, is also something that you have to think about. And, you know, in the long term, you
may have to hire somebody in for a period of time, especially
if someone goes out on a leave that, you know, is something like
FMLA. But in the short term, to the extent
that you can provide a little bit of that ebb
and flow in your workforce, I think that's one of the key
(17:03):
areas to make sure you have on
And what a cool way to think about gig economy, right? And
gig roles. If you can think about creating those gig
opportunities for maybe somebody who works in a different restaurant, but they have all
the skills you need, right? Going back to like a more skills-based way
of looking at things. That is revolutionary. If
(17:26):
you think about really getting into that kind of mindset of
leveraging a gig economy that way, it had a huge impact.
And, you know, they have, they have the skills that you need and
may not have the hours that they want. Right. And so all of a sudden you're,
you're kind of providing them with more work opportunities and,
you know, you're filling that gap that, that you need in order to support one
(17:53):
Yeah. As we wrap up our conversation, James,
and you kind of look ahead at the future, and I've
asked this question before to a couple of people around like, you know, five years from now,
sometimes five years is really far away, as we know the pandemic has taught us.
But, you know, how do you see some of these evolving demographics really
changing the future of work with respect to caregiving? Because we know
(18:14):
that the boomer generation is nearing retirement.
Now, everybody's going to retire at obviously 65, but that's
changing. And so you have the complexities of knowledge
transfer and all the other things, but then you add in now this population of
Well, we actually did ask a question to
(18:37):
those who took this particular survey that was
a part of our caregiving research. And we found that one in five current
caregivers are expecting to take on new or
additional caregiver responsibilities for the elderly population
in the next five years. And about
13% or, you know, say one in eight who
(18:59):
are not currently currently providing caregiving of any sort are
expecting in the next five years to be providing care for
someone in the elderly population. So it's
not surprising. We know that across the next few
years, I think by about 2030, roughly one in five
adults will be six year old. And so that
(19:22):
is, that's the direction that we
as organizations need to be thinking about what does caregiving
for the elderly look like in terms of the support we can provide for
our while continuing to provide what we do for other
groups. That's the one that if we don't pay
attention to that in the next few years, we're going
(19:48):
Yeah. Well, James, this was a great conversation and I'll make sure to put in the
show notes a link to the research that Sherma has done on this topic because it's
so important. And I just appreciate you taking a few minutes of your day to
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