Overwhelming, exhausting, unsustainable. These three words fall short of adequately describing the demands placed on the over 43 million people in the United States who currently provide unpaid care to a family member. Fifty-two percent of these caregivers are also employed full- or part-time; yet their employer only knows about 56 percent of them. Add to these statistics an aging population and increased longevity, and many experts have indicated an impending health crisis is on the horizon.

To their credit, caregiver advocates have been pushing for public policies to be created at a national level to address this growing stressor on Americans. With the recent enactment of RAISE— the Recognize, Assist, Include, Support and Engage Family Caregivers Act—a range of diverse stakeholders, including family caregivers, health care and social service providers, and employers, will soon come together to develop a national family-caregiving strategic plan.

Fortunately, there is plenty a company can do now to prepare for the RAISE Act's recommendations — or any other legislative initiatives — that address how the nation can best support modern caregivers. The seven steps below guide you to create your own comprehensive, corporate-caregiving strategy.

1. Develop a clearly articulated position and policy on employee-caregiver support.

Do you believe that taking care of your employees and taking care of your employees' families are your company's responsibility, in whole or in part? A growing number of companies do. Take some time to decide where your company stands and draft (or update) your policy on employee-caregiver support as well as your policies on attendance, leave, flexible work, compensation, recruitment, hiring, promotion, discipline, and termination.

Make sure each policy contemplates and includes an understanding of the impact of caregiving challenges–whether disclosed or not–on these aspects of your business, your company's commitment to support, and the language of any caregiver law in your state/locality (see Step 3). A comprehensive set of policies is a great step toward creating a supportive workplace culture.

2. Design out-of-the-box, flexible approaches to solving employee-caregiver challenges.

Many of the demands of caregiving take place during the “typical” work day. It's when mom's doctor finally calls, or little Jasmine's teacher reaches out at last to discuss challenging behaviors at school. When your employees can't address these and other demands of caregiving easily, it increases their stress, impacts their ability to focus on the work at hand, and often leads to more days off — or worse — a reduction in hours or job flight.

This isn't news to any of us involved in employing people. It also isn't news to any of us involved in caregiving. What is news, however, is the emergence of creative strategies to address these issues, such as the small office set aside at a company so that employees can make and take time-sensitive and private phone calls about caregiving, paid family leave or the ability to donate paid time off to a co-worker caring for a spouse with brain cancer, or flexibility in geography or schedule for an employee whose dad with Alzheimer's has somehow walked out of the memory-care unit. Again. Think imaginatively about what your company can do to support caregivers; many of these approaches cost little to nothing, yet the payoff is immense.

3. Understand the impact of federal, state and local laws regarding caregivers in the workforce.

According to the Center for WorkLife Law, employment discrimination because of an employee's caregiving obligations is on the rise. Whether “family responsibilities discrimination” (FRD) is based on pregnancy, motherhood, fatherhood, care for sick family members, care for family members with disabilities, or care for ill or aging parents, it's a no-no.

Make sure you understand how many long-standing anti-discrimination laws, like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, prohibit employment discrimination based on certain protected classes (like women or people with disabilities). Then, brush up on state and local laws specifically prohibiting unlawful discrimination against caregivers; these laws exist in several states and over 90 local jurisdictions.

Finally, comply with these laws. Your employees are not looking to add complex litigation to their already challenged to-do lists.

4. Train staff, especially managers, in supporting employee-caregivers.

Unfortunately, front-line managers are a key source of caregiver-discrimination claims. These same people can–and should–be a key source of support for your employee caregivers. Use the ongoing relationship between managers and employees to your company's advantage by ensuring that supervisors understand the impact of caregiving on the people they supervise.

Make sure your managers understand how often workers don't reveal that they are caregivers as well as what supports your company offers and when to advise their use. Finally, offer professional development so that managers understand and confront their own unconscious biases, e.g., how they feel about pregnant or nursing employees, family leave, “proper” work habits, “what it takes” to get a job done.

5. Gain executive sponsorship and buy in.

Find out who are your corporate caregiving champions at the top of the corporate ladder. Many of the folks on the top rungs are at the age where they are caring for their own aging parents with dementia or COPD or osteoporosis. Your CFO may herself be struggling because mom is no longer safe living alone or driving; the VP of Sales might have missed work because dad just gave his credit card number to a caller claiming to be the IRS.

These are executives who have been there and who get it. When you approach them, chances are high they will buy in to the caregiving goals you are driving, lend their influence, and find the budget you need to achieve those goals. That's when you'll realize that the “C” in “C-Suite” really stands for “Caregiving.”

6. Offer an array of benefits to address all aspects of caregiving.

Some companies are ahead of the curve when it comes to addressing the needs of their employee caregivers. For instance, a growing number now consider caregiving benefits to be part and parcel of their company's well-being strategy. Why? Despite recommendations to the contrary, people in caregiving roles are NOT putting on their own oxygen mask before assisting others. There is no time to go to the gym, or get a physical, or enroll in a wellness challenge at work, no matter how appealing the incentive. Instead of addressing their own self-care needs, these employees spend their “free” time dealing with unresolved family crises.

When companies help families solve their most pressing caregiving challenges, they unblock the path to personal wellness, improved health outcomes, and decreased healthcare costs. If your company still has some work to do in this area, you need to think beyond “our EAP covers that” or “we offer back-up care so our family caregiver needs are all set.”

While both of these are essential to a solid caregiving benefits offering, understand that these address the symptoms of caregiving. What they fail to address, however, are the root causes that drive the need for counseling or unexpected coverage needs in the first place. With a little research or a call to your broker, find out what other caregiving benefits are out there to round out current offerings. Then, make some decisions before the flurry of open enrollment requires all your attention.

7. Communicate openly and often with staff.

Communication is vital to the success of your new corporate, family-caregiving strategy. Unfortunately, communication of benefits remains a persistent challenge for companies across the board. Despite emailing company newsletters, pushing notifications, and adding benefits to the company portal, utilization still lags behind desired levels.

If this struggle is real for you, too, consider a return to some low-tech strategies in your outreach arsenal. While perhaps indelicate, flyers on the back of the bathroom stall door or next to the mirror at the restroom sink may catch your employee's eye more reliably than one more email in a cluttered inbox. And, because employees often trust their co-workers more than the corporate “suits,” the did-you-hear-about? word-of-mouth approach often has surprising results.

The demands placed on modern employee caregivers are not going away. With just over 25 percent of millennial employees now identifying themselves as caregivers, the challenges placed on your workforce will only continue to increase over time. As a result, companies like yours are tasked with helping solve the nation's caregiving crisis. Your company's commitment to a corporate family-caregiving strategy is a key part of the solution. America's caregivers thank you.

Carolyn A. Romano, J.D., (cromano@torchlight.care) is vice president of product at Torchlight and has over three decades of experience advocating for and participating in systemic-change efforts to improve the lives of children, the elderly and populations at-risk.

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7 steps for developing a family caregiving strategy

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