In these tight economic times, companies are under constant pressure to retain top talent, and creative employee benefits become more important. As apparently ageless baby boomers arrive at the 65+ mark - by 2030, one in five Americans is projected to be age 65 or older -demand is increasing for a new employee benefit: elder care.

"Employees must balance work commitments and family-care responsibilities," said Cindy Carrillo, founder and CEO of backup care provider Work Options Group, based in Superior. "Over the past three or four years, we have seen a growing interest on the part of employers for elder care."

Already a significant number of large Colorado-based companies, including Hunter Douglas Window Fashions, Roche Pharmaceuticals and Qwest, have signed on for the Work Options Group backup care benefit, as has the University of Denver.

"There are also national companies, such as Merrill Lynch, Janus Capital Group and Microsoft, who have employees in the state," said Heather Hope, public relations manager for Work Options Group. "Those employees are eligible for the backup care benefit."



Affordable help

She explained some of the factors driving demand for her company's services. "People are staying in the workforce longer, people are living longer and their desire to remain independent is putting more pressure on family members to provide care and support."

Hope noted that while most backup care right now involves children, around 15 percent to 20 percent of requests involve adult or elder care.

Nancy Driskill, MS, RN, owner of Consultants for Aging Families in Fort Collins, assists older individuals and their families plan for and adjust to the changes and stages of aging.

"I have been wondering when elder care as a benefit was going to come up," she said. "It is surely something folks are looking for. Those who want to stay in their own homes and be safe and comfortable have difficulty finding affordable help."

Private care is expensive (roughly $20 per hour with a two-hour minimum), and finding qualified, reliable, trustworthy caregivers on a moment's notice may prove to be risky business.

On the other hand, as an employee benefit, backup care is structured like insurance and caregivers are fully vetted by the provider. For a few dollars a month, the employer provides the option to everyone in the company.

"A typical program provides 80 to 100 hours of care per year at a highly subsidized price of $4 per hour," Hope said. "It does not matter to the employer who needs the care. It might be a child, a parent, a spouse or Great Aunt Sally. The goal of the program is to make it possible for care to be delivered to the dependent person and to give the employee the freedom to continue working."

In Driskill's view, the appeal of such a plan is its simplicity.

"We need to do it cleanly and neatly without layers of regulation," she said.



Good economic sense

The elder care benefit makes economic sense for employers. According to the National Alliance for Caregiving, family members spend an average of 22 hours per week providing care to their elderly relatives. Presumably, not all those hours take place outside the working day. So if a company supplies 10,000 hours of care in a year, those are 10,000 hours of productivity not lost to unscheduled absenteeism.

"It's tough to compartmentalize work and home," Hope said. "And companies are realizing that it is not realistic to ask people to separate personal and professional lives. We expect a lot of employees, so it's important to give them the support they need to do their jobs well."

Driskill said that she has observed a growing awareness by employers that elder care issues may be affecting their employees.

"I have recently had some clients whose employers have said, 'If you need guidance, we will provide assistance for elder care advising,'" she said. "But in my field, we have seen little support for actual care, and for people who are trying to work, care is a worry."

According to the National Study of the Changing Workforce published in 2002, "when more supportive work-life policies and practices are available, employees exhibit more positive work outcomes: job satisfaction, commitment to employer and retention, as well as more positive life outcomes: less interference between job and family life, less negative spillover from job to home, greater life satisfaction, and better mental health."

The report also notes that more than 35 percent of employees care for a relative 65 years or older. The operative word in this statistic is "employees," an indicator of a general shift in the role of family and community in caring for the young or infirm.



Sandwich duties

One result of the change in social norms, as reported by the Society for Human Resource Management, is both the growth in the number of employees with elder care responsibilities and the growth of the number of employees with both child care and elder care responsibilities. A 2008 SHRM benefits report indicated the needs for child care tend to go down over time, while the needs for elder care go up with life expectancy, which continues to rise in a long-running trend.

Given that the death rate from the three leading killers in the United States - heart disease, cancer and stroke - keeps declining, life expectancy will just keep right on rising.

These numbers hold some significance for Colorado. If retirees continue to relocate here, often to be close to children and grandchildren, the need for easy access to backup care will grow. Assuming that the economy does not go in the tank permanently, the need for corporate sponsored backup care is likely to increase. Great Aunt Sally is counting on it.