There are never enough hours in the day for caregivers to get everything done. However, remote work during the pandemic has helped them reclaim some time.
According to a 2023 study conducted by the Becker Friedman Institute, caregivers are putting their energy into their families, household chores, leisure activities, and sleep.
Getting rid of her morning commute was one of the appeals of remote work for brand strategist Andrea Mills. Having that extra time allowed her to cook her mom “breakfast and eat lunch with her every day. Dad took care of her while I was working, but I was able to check on her.”
More importantly, the flexibility of remote work allowed Mills to fly from Indiana to Arizona after her mom’s breast cancer returned and was deemed terminal. “They had given her six weeks [to live] but she ended up living almost a year. We were able to have so many good memories that I would not have had if I couldn’t have gone to Arizona,” she said. With the accommodations Mills’s current employer Hummingbirds provides her as a remote, part-time worker, she can help her dad adjust to life without his wife. The Modern Workplace Report from Care.com and Mother Honestly found that 76 percent of caregivers said that remote work improved their overall quality of life and 77 percent of managers agreed.
Back to the office
However, as early as 2021, employers began issuing return-to-office (RTO) policies, requiring workers to go into the office at least a few days a week. According to a 2023 report from Resume Builder, 90 percent of companies plan to return to the office by the end of 2024. Executives at IBM and General Motors have said that in-person work allows for better collaboration, mentorship, workplace culture, and career trajectory. They also believe in-person work can improve a company’s profit.
While some employers welcome workers back with better commuter and childcare benefits, others threaten to fire them if they don’t comply with their RTO policy. For this reason, public relations professional LeAnne Weekes says there should be better protections and benefits for caregivers. “There needs to be some stipends and federal legalization towards childcare, even for remote work,” she said. “I know that when it comes to in-office, they’re looking at building daycare centers within office spaces and giving people stipends, but remote workers need support too—especially if they have insane deadlines to work with.”
Weekes said she’s in a demanding industry where people are known to “lose their entire minds” if you don’t answer the phone. It has been hard to get employers to understand that she’s a mother with a life outside of work. “Life came at a lot of us fast during the pandemic,” she explained. “People aren’t willing to give their entire existence to a job anymore.”
Kimberly Kadziolka, executive director of the nonprofit agency Parent Network of Western New York, says she believes that employers will have better chances to reach their bottom line when they meet their employees with empathy. “I really believe employers and employees should think that the employee and their family come first, because if all that’s taken care of then they’re going to do good work for you,” she said.
A 2023 study from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School titled “Does Happiness Improve Worker Productivity?” found that happier workers are 12 percent more productive than unhappy workers. When workers were happier they experienced increased levels of creativity, motivation, and social engagement. Companies with high levels of employee satisfaction get a better return on their investment and tend to outperform their competitors in the long term, according to a 2011 study from London Business School professor Alex Edmans.
Higher pay can initially incentivize workers, but when that motivation tapers other factors are needed to continue workplace satisfaction: well-being, connection, clarity and certainty, significance, challenge, future vision, and happiness.
If working professionals are struggling to explain their needs or caregiving situations to their managers, Kadziolka said organizations such as the Parent Network of Western New York can provide them with talking points to guide them through a conversation. Kathryn Krawczyk, who works remotely as an editor for Energy News Network, can attest to that. As someone who prefers not to share a ton of personal information about herself at work, she found it difficult to separate her personal and professional lives when her dad’s health unexpectedly declined after a routine surgery to treat a Chiari malformation.
Krawczyk told her job about the surgery and took about two days off from work, but didn’t reveal her dad’s worsening condition upon coming home or his later return to the hospital until she had to. Her job allowed her to work from the hospital while looking after her dad—a relief due to a shortage of nurses there.
“That’s what I like about being remote: If I’m not there for an hour or so, nobody’s gonna notice,” Krawczyk said. “With the flexibility, I would have my schedule where I would do the essential stuff in the morning, and then I’d take my laptop with me [to the hospital] and we would just sit and hang out depending on the state he was in and I would finish my day.”
If Krawczyk wasn’t able to get work done, she wasn’t penalized. But it’s not uncommon for caregivers to experience repercussions in the workplace. In 2015, the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP reported that 61 percent of caregivers experience at least one work-related challenge due to their at-home responsibilities, such as receiving a performance or attendance warning.
Asking for time away can be challenging, especially when the request can cause managers to question work commitment. Mills recognized that she didn’t take off as much time as she possibly should have while she was caregiving. “It was difficult to justify the time off,” she said. “A coworker could be, ‘Oh, I’m going to Hawaii and need that week off,’ and the manager would approve it. I’d say, ‘I’m tired and need a couple of days to recover’ and they’d question my work ethic. I couldn’t go to Hawaii to recover.”
The current push to return to the office has forced many professionals to evaluate what gets lost when forced to leave home—especially caregivers, who have seen the benefits of significant policy change at the federal and state levels brought about by the pandemic dwindle.
Weekes worries that forcing people back to the office will disrupt the progress within race equity and equality that came along with remote work. “When you work in an office as a person of color, as a Black woman, you experience many microaggressions. Having that space to just say no, you are not going to ruin my day, is wonderful,” Weekes said. She says distance work also provides people with the confidence to report work abuses because they don’t have to worry about someone looking over their shoulder as they write an email to human resources.
But remote work has its limitations. At one point, Krawczyk considered whether she would have to opt into her company’s policy that allows employees to take sick leave to care for themselves or a family member if they fall ill. “Just the act of making food for more people and helping a person get around that can’t do it on their own is pretty unsustainable,” she said. “It’s pretty impossible—I had to do it for a week and I could barely do it.”
There’s a common misconception that working remotely means people are fully available to care for their loved ones or have an abundance of extra time to pour into themselves. That’s not the case, Kadziolka said, and why she believes it’s important for local organizations and employers to provide creative solutions. For a company, that could mean setting up an employee resource group (ERG) for caregivers, while a service organization might focus on helping caregivers find in-home or out-of-home respite programs.
Help for families
Despite the Parent Network being in all eight counties of Western New York and the area being relatively small, Kadziolka said many families don’t know about it. “We’ve been doing a lot of outreach opportunities as well as fundraisers, more so to get our name out there,” she said. That way more people can become exposed to resources and funding opportunities through individualized assistance. Between the amount of accessible information to sift through and the potential cost of care, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
And the cost of care is a significant barrier for people. According to Gensworth’s 2022 Cost of Care Survey, New York and Michigan are above the national median in five out of six categories—homemaker services, home health aide, adult day health care, assisted living facility, nursing home (semi-private room), and nursing home (private room). To put that into perspective, the median yearly cost of in-home care in 2021 was $61,776 for a Home Health Aide and $59,488 for homemaker services.
Both Kadziolka and Krawczyk mentioned programs where family members get paid to provide care as an option for caregivers struggling to juggle full-time work with at-home responsibilities, but those programs are limited in resources, have restrictive eligibility (such as applicants must be receiving Medicaid), and don’t exist in all states.
Despite there being little progress in implementing solutions for caregivers, employers can implement benefits under the work-family practices umbrella and start caregiver support initiatives. A Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers 2022 report lists several quick actions companies can take, such as educating employees about Medicare and Medicaid coverage for long-term care services, training managers to effectively interact with caregiver employees, and preparing contracts for health care insurers that require them to include caregiving-friendly workplace services.
About 38 million people provided unpaid care to an adult family member or friend in 2021, a total economic value of $600 billion, reported AARP. Behind those numbers are real people drowning in labor at home and work, and there are too many caregivers in the U.S. labor force to ignore.
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