The moral and economic imperative to support working caregivers

At Yurtle, we believe society’s principal change agents, public sector institutions and employers, must do more to safeguard the wellbeing of individuals with adult and childcare responsibilities.

We believe supporting professionals with caregiving duties is the single most impactful initiative to solve for stubborn gender imbalances and unnecessarily high rates of workplace absence. Failure to address this challenge could even threaten key social concepts such as the freedom to work and intergenerational cohesion.

The impetus to support caregivers is a function of the rapid growth in the number of caregivers, thanks to our ageing population; a truly systemic challenge that determines the viability (or lack thereof) of our pension, health and social care systems.

Without these systems our society cannot generate and capture economic and social value. As is often the case with systemic challenges that benefit multiple actors, it can be difficult to generate momentum and progress solutions.

Whilst paternalism can be an ethically complicated concept, the argument for public spending in helping our society adjust to its aged demographic is strong given inaction is catastrophic and given no one agent of change can succeed single-handedly. Public sector institutions are best placed to structurally incentivise and enable positive change in the workplace and at home.

The best recent example of this is pension auto-enrolment. It’s rollout since 2012 has led to a tenfold increase in total membership of defined contribution occupational schemes, from 2.1 million in 2011 to 21 million in 2019. It also led to 1 million fewer people facing inadequate retirement incomes. A success by most definitions.

Our prevailing social model is to have those of working age, pay the way for those of non-working age. The assumption is that the average person will spend 20 years of early life in education (honing their skills), the next 35-40 in work (monetising their skills), and finally the last 10 years in retirement (reaping the reward of monetisation). We are now living longer, but in poorer health, so we need disproportionately larger pensions to support our extra years of life and health dependence. In fact, the ratio of people of a pensionable age for every 1,000 people of working age is projected to rise from 305 in mid-2016 to 370 by mid-2041 according to the Office for National Statistics.

Couple the fact that health dependency has increased with the fact that 2 in 3 people aged over 55 would prefer to age and die in their own home, it is clear to see why every day in the UK 12,000 people assume caregiving responsibilities for an adult loved one. Individuals, mostly women (64% of caregivers are women), are being called upon (unfairly) by society to meet their obligation of care to a loved one.

Whilst pension auto-enrolment is a reason to believe the public sector will play a role, it would appear that the baton for caregiver support has now been passed to UK corporates.

Fortunately, many of the goals and themes that UK corporates have under the banner of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) are most effectively delivered against by addressing the needs of caregivers. These themes include financial wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and gender equality of opportunity. The frustration for carer advocates is that caregiving is rarely is credited with being the cause and common denominator in all of these challenges, and thus corporates fail to address it.

Astute employers and People/HR professionals will note that the gender pay and pension gap, as well as the representation of women in senior leadership are largely determined by the rates of under-employment amongst working women. This in turn is a function of careers conflicting with caregiving. In the UK, there are three times more women than men in flexible or part-time employment in order to reconcile work and care. Naturally, this constrains their earning power. Sadly, for many this is only a short-term solution, with over 600 carers leaving the workplace each day altogether according to Carers UK (thanks to the extent of care needs).

The impact, amongst other things, is financial vulnerability and ruin in later life. According to PensionBee, a woman aged 64 is likely to have 139,451 less in her pension pot than a comparable man due to interruptions in paid labour (especially in what would be high earning years – 30-50 years old). Financial stress, coupled with a likelihood to be seven times lonelier as a result of caring dramatically undermines the mental wellbeing of carers. Solving for caregiving then, presents the most capital efficient way to address these critical DEI goals.

Putting “softer” DEI/CSR themes to one side, let us consider how caregiving relates to “harder” objectives such as reducing employee absence and presenteeism.

According to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the cost of staff sickness has grown by £30bn a year to £103bn in 2023 in the UK. Much of this cost is down to lost productivity, but also presenteeism. At Yurtle, we believe that much of the sick leave observed is actually care related leave being laundered as sick leave. Our research with Fruitful Insights proves this isn’t purely speculative. Female caregivers have an absence rate 22% higher and male caregivers have an absence rate 18% higher than non-caregivers. BUPA’s research goes even further, showing that “carers take an average of two days of annual leave per year to care for loved ones, with 16- to 34-year-olds taking nearly three days and millennials taking an average of six sick days.” Whether you have had child and adult care responsibilities, this should make intuitive sense.

If we accept that admitting to being a caregiver at work can put your career progression and pay at risk, it is reasonable to expect that a meaningful proportion of absence and presenteeism is a function of employees tending to the urgent needs of a dependent but not feeling sufficiently protected at work to volunteer the actual reason for their absence.

Given this mix of risks and costs to UK businesses, it’s hardly surprising to see the explosion of interest and investment by UK corporates to support their employees with caregiving responsibilities. Yurtle envisions a world in the very near future where caregiver support is as prevalent in workplace wellbeing as medical health and life insurance. We believe our ageing demographics, the shortage of talent, and the perennial productivity and absence challenges represent an irrepressible force for change.

To find out more about Yurtle, and Zest’s Marketplace offering, click here.