Any company – big or small – has to recognize that elder care is now a strategic business issue, yet precious few have addressed it. It is particularly acute for small business. Why? Imagine a director of sales, obviously a key person in an organization, must suddenly help her elderly mother. Often, this involves a crisis – her mother fell and broke her hip, or she is returning home from hospital after major surgery and is discharged prematurely. Either way, the elderly parent – likely living alone – needs help and turns to her daughter.
The director of sales is the only sibling in the family who lives nearby, so the onus falls on her shoulders. It means she will be off work for a few weeks. To make matters worse, what if something similar happens to another key person in the company – maybe the head of HR or training, or the chief financial officer? What if it happens at the same time? Indeed, if circumstances befall two or three members of the senior management team, it could be catastrophic for the business.
Last year, CIBC released a report called Who Cares: The Economics of Caring for Aging Parents. The report was based on CIBC’s Aging Parents Poll, an online survey of randomly selected adults across Canada taken in March, 2017. Employers should take heed. Here are some survey highlights:
- 17 per cent of Canadians are 65 and older, but in the next decade this will rise to 22 per cent;
- Some two million Canadians – or 14 per cent of those with parents over age 65 – incur out-of-pocket, care-related costs, and the average outlay is $3,300 per year per caregiver;
- 30 per cent of workers with elder care responsibilities sacrifice an average of 450 hours off work each year, which is about 25 per cent of their total work hours.
Keep in mind that that the largest group of caregivers is aged 45 to 65 and often those in the company with the most expertise and experience. Also, people in the workforce today are staying healthy and working longer, but they may be caregivers to more than one elderly person. You cannot afford to lose such people for any length of time, especially when you bear in mind that the average length of caregiving time is not a few weeks; it is 6.3 years.
My company provides elder care crisis and planning services to the elderly and their families, and I don’t know of one Canadian employer that could be called a model for how to address the impact of elder care on the workforce. This is not a problem that is going away. In fact, based on demographic projections in Canada, we are only now starting to see the impact. Read more at GlobeandMail.com
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