Sally the Sales Rep is a smart, dedicated worker who almost always provides her employer with excellent service. Sometimes she can't, though, because she's distracted by obligations relating to her elderly father. Does her company help her out? No. Does it wind up paying, anyway? You bet.
A new study prepared for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company quantifies how much employers are paying, whether they know it or not, for employees with eldercare responsibilities. MetLife's position is that offering eldercare benefits is fiscally wise. It finds that employers stand to save $3 to $5 for every dollar they spend helping employees find eldercare resources. "We tell employers: "This is a real problem for you,'" says James Weil, vice president of MetLife's mature market group. "If you think about the leading edge of baby boomers just hitting age 50, you can see that more and more employees are going to be affected by aging parents."
In a study that applied a model of eldercare costs to an anonymous manufacturing firm with about 87,000 salaried employees, Sally Coberly, director of the Washington Business Group on Health and Gail Hunt of Gibson-Hunt Associates, found that total annual employer costs ran to $5.5 million. The analysis prepared for MetLife estimates that 2 percent of the firm's employees provide actual physical help to older relatives in the form of assistance with eating, bathing, dressing, and so on.The 2 percent estimate is conservative. It takes into account the fact that the manufacturer has a highly male-skewed work force; it doesn't include those who provide less intensive services to parents such as shopping and financial assistance, and it doesn't include costs incurred by employees who provide long-distance support to aging parents. Since women are much more likely than men to provide eldercare, organizations with larger shares of women employees can expect higher eldercare-related costs. Using a more liberal 12 percent prevalence of caregivers in the work force would crank up estimated employer costs for the study firm to $33 million.
Various factors feed into the price employers pay for eldercare. In the manufacturing case study, replacement costs stemmed from the estimated 1 percent of caregiving employees who quit their jobs altogether to care for an older parent. An estimated 11 percent of caregivers take off an average of six days a year to provide routine care, while over half of caregivers average three days a year dealing with eldercare crises. Other costs include extra managerial time needed to supervise caregivers, as well as the high demand placed by some caregivers on health insurance benefits and mental health services.
Partial absenteeism--late arrivals, long lunch breaks, early departures--takes its toll, too, but not nearly as much as the workday interruptions faced by caregivers who talk on the phone with loved ones and service providers. This situation can arise even with employees who don't physically care for parents or whose parents live elsewhere. Estimated at one hour per week per caregiver, this factor is the biggest drain of all on employee productivity, amounting to over half of the estimated total cost to the manufacturing firm analyzed in the study.
Employers can ameliorate many of these costs without too much trouble or expense by offering resource and referral hotlines that guide workers toward adult day care, meals on wheels, and other services. This type of benefit costs as little as 50 cents to $1 per employee, says MetLife's Weil. Today, about 1,200 corporations in the U.S. offer such resource programs. Two of the best, according to Hunt, are provided by Marriott International and IBM.
Since Mariott's business depends on customer service, the mood of its employees is extremely important, says Donna Klein, director of the corporation's worklife programs. Marriott tested its Associate Resource Line for nearly two years. Now, any of its 185,000 employees nationwide can dial a toll-free number any time of the day or night and consult in one of many languages with professional social workers about a wide range of personal problems.
"We want our resource line to handle anything and everything that may be happening in the employee's life that could affect his or her productivity," says Klein. The average Mariott worker is just 35, but 15 percent say they have eldercare responsibilities. During the test period, eldercare issues accounted for 8 percent of calls. As American workers and their parents get older, that number is bound to grow.
"The MetLife Study of Employer Costs for Working Caregivers" is available at no charge from MetLife Senior Services; telephone (203) 221-6580.
American Demographics, 06/01/96 by Tibbett L. Speer
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