Bridget Bearden, PhD, of the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) discusses Caregiving @ Work: A National Inflection. Bridget explains why caregiving has become a defining workplace issue, the tools employers already have to help, the enormous financial stakes of long-term and child care, and how cross-sector collaboration among employers, financial services, and policymakers can ease the stress on caregivers, ahead of EBRI’s Caregiving at Work Forum on October 22 in Washington, DC.
Transcript:
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
It’s so great to see you. Thanks for popping by the program this morning.
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
Hi Jeffrey, thanks for having me today.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Absolutely, and I know we’re going to talk about the Caregiving at Work initiative, what it’s about, how long it lasts, all that kind of good stuff. Before we get into it, I want to give you an opportunity to tell our great audience and fans of your work exactly who the Employee Benefits Research Institute is. Who is EBRI?
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
Thanks. EBRI is a non-profit member association membership organization. We were founded in 1978.
Our mission is to produce objective research and education to improve employee benefit design, decision making, and policymaking. For the last 50 years, we’ve been producing objective, non-partisan research on employee benefits adopted and used by so many in the benefits ecosystem. We’re just thrilled to be continuing that mission and to produce and disseminate a steady stream of reliable gold standard research.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I would just add, I’ve known EBRI since I started in my career in the retirement industry. It is what I would consider to be the OG, the original generator of great research. We’re very pleased to have you on the program.
Great work as always. Let’s transition to the Caregiving at Work initiative. Why start this initiative?
What is it and why is it so important for EBRI and its membership?
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
We are at a moment of national inflection on the impact of caregiving in the workplace with demographics and increasing affordability concerns for long-term care, for child care, employers play an increasingly important role in the stress in the productivity and the day-to-day lives of their employees and who many of them aren’t actually identifying as caregivers. This is a national moment where many organizations are simultaneously thinking about the caregiving responsibilities and what employers can do to help improve the financial, emotional, and physical stress of these very important people in our economy and society.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I like that you bring up that there are many organizations that are working through this because I have to ask you, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach just like you and I are individuals with different needs, our parents are individuals with different needs. A lot of organizations can come at this in a very thoughtful way.
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
Yes, so there are both kind of emerging caregiving benefits that employers can offer with the assistance of their benefits consultants and their providers, but there’s also kind of existing benefits that employers may be already offering that could be repositioned for caregivers within their workforce. It’s very important to remember like that identification issue because not all employees might raise their hand and say, hey, I’m a caregiver. It’s even something that I myself have a hard time admitting even though I do have caregiving responsibilities.
And so there are just so many different personas of who is a caregiver and the different kinds of needs that they have because they might need a flexible work environment but maybe they just need a concierge to help set up the appointments for their loved one. And so there’s just so many different flavors and a lot of times employers already have the tools that they need to provide meaningful resources and programs for these employees and to help lift some of that burden.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So you kind of touched on it before, Bridget, but let me ask you about some of the major roles around improving the lot of caregivers. Let’s start, and you hinted at this again, with employers. What’s the role that they have here?
I would think it would be pretty important.
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
Yeah, absolutely. The employer channel is critical to the health of the American worker society and the American family. So the employers play a role by providing obviously financial support, social support, emotional support to their employees.
And it’s sometimes some of these caregiving programs that, yes, they could provide social financial support, but a lot of times it’s more social support. There is a range of programs that could be offered, whether it’s an employee resource group or a business resource group to an employee assistance program to kind of backup care services and onsite child care. So there’s just an array of services that a benefit that an employer can offer.
The important part is even before you get to how to implement a holistic caregiving strategy, there has to be like a culture of care at the top in senior leadership and almost a de-stigmatization of being a caregiver or self-identification. So as leaders start to talk about the issue more and even be a little bit public with their personal experiences, this will give the opportunity to employees to also open up and then kind of formulate a more tailored and customized strategy that employees are aware of and will actually use. Because many employers might find themselves offering programs that employees just might not be aware of or aren’t confident with how to use or that their information might be shared back with their employer.
So employers play a huge role because many employees don’t go outside of their closed networks to get this information. Study after study shows that employees are going to ask their friends and family for support for whether it’s financial advice, retirement advice, long-term care planning advice, and they have a form of support at the place of work every single day that is trusted, that can be a guiding hand for employees as they navigate this really troublesome time.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Let me ask you about financial services because many employees and their employers have financial advisors, they have retirement and benefits programs. What role does the financial services industry play in helping with caregiving?
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
So one of the whole themes, a core pillar behind this Caregiving at Work initiative is cross-sector collaboration. And when we talk about cross-sector collaboration, yes, employers play a huge role as well as the caregiving advocacy networks, the aging networks, policy makers, but then we have benefits providers and benefits consultants and financial services, whether they’re a retirement advisor, a financial advisor, or providing the platform to the employer. As we know, education and advice is critical and paramount to long-term financial security, and we measure that using our retirement security projection model.
And again and again, we find that kind of on average, American workers, about 60% of American workers are on track to not outlive their assets in retirement. But at the same time, we find that most employees have not begun, especially as they get older in age, have done almost no planning for their own personal long-term care needs, not to mention the long-term care needs of others that might be in their immediate network. And that’s remarkable considering we know that 73% of all employees expect to provide care to somebody in their immediate network in the future.
So the role of financial services is so important, and this is the role of financial advisors, of financial advisors that are also retirement plan advisors that are servicing retirement plans and talking to employees directly about not only their personal long-term care needs, but the long-term care needs and the caregiving needs of those in their network. And it’s very important that we want to be broad in this definition of caregiver, because yes, we all will likely to have dependents, parents that we may need to care for in the future, but many of us also have younger dependents. And the cost of care, whether it’s long-term care at one end of the spectrum or child care at the other end, has risen higher than inflation.
So what we have in the middle for individuals that are kind of caring for both is like this sandwich generation. And retirement plan advisors, the retirement plan industry has such a huge opportunity to educate their organizational clients, the employers, as well as the employees on how to budget and how to plan for these expenses. Because there’s Morningstar data that shows that the conditional cost of long-term care is in the 200,000s, if not more.
And EBRI’s data shows that if long-term care was accounted for, the chances of that retirement security would go up by 10 percentage points. And so the cost of long-term care is enormous. And for individuals that also have to consider younger dependent child care, well, that has also risen tremendously.
And there are benefit programs that just haven’t quite honestly kept pace, like dependent care FSAs. There’s a huge cap on dependent care FSAs that hasn’t kept pace with inflation or the cost of child care. So the financial services community can take a look at all, be very comprehensive and holistic about the cost of caregiving and incorporate it into financial education, into financial planning, retirement planning, whether it’s a seminar, a module, whatever it might be, documentation and blogs, there’s a huge opportunity to educate and help individuals make informed decisions.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And you talked about before about government, but is there a role for both federal and state government and government agencies here? Because they do a lot and we rely on them for many things today.
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
Yeah, of course there’s a role. And a lot of times, as we know, government action can drive or hinder innovation in the private sector. And so there are proposals, there is federal legislation that would help improve the adoption of long-term care insurance, for example, or expand the allowable expenses under HSAs so that they can be applied to expenses incurred by the HSA account holders’ parents for their care needs.
The states have a role, states are taking a number of different approaches. So there’s a state-based long-term care program, long-term care insurance in the state of Washington, that’s called WACARES. There are other states that are considering these long-term care insurance programs.
There’s also the State Paid Family Medical Leave Act, where there’s a number of states that have adopted or started offering. So there is a good deal of innovation happening at state level, and there is a little bit less innovation and policy activity at the federal level. What we’re hearing from employers is that they may have a difficult time navigating what some might refer to as like a patchwork of state legislation.
And there may be preferences for a federal paid family leave program. I mean, there’s also been proposals on creating a, almost like a long-term care insurance mandate, the WISH Act by Congressman Suozzi. And there are definitely ideas swirling around from state and federal policy angles.
And those are wonderful, but it’s also important that it’s a multi-stakeholder process, and employers are involved in the policy development. Because at the end of the day, employers need to build their benefit strategies around these different pieces of legislation.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And I like that you brought up the term patchwork quilt, because I think probably employers often feel that they’re trying to kind of patch things together, and when they’re strategizing and putting together their benefits program. In the remaining time we have, I do want to touch on the big event coming up, October 22nd. Can you tell us a little bit about that Caregiving at Work event?
It’s a kickoff event, but I think it’s in-person and also virtual. What do you have on tap?
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
Yeah, so it’s going to be a great day. On October 22nd is our inaugural Caregiving at Work forum. So just to step back a moment, the Caregiving at Work initiative, it is a two-year research, education, and awareness program to help educate employers and benefits decision makers, including policy makers, on the impact of caregiving in the workplace, how it shows up, and what private market solutions are available for employers to help alleviate the financial, emotional, and physical stresses of caregivers. So as part of this research, education, and awareness initiative, we have a series of research that is underscored by our partnership with Greenwald Research. We’re oversimplifying caregivers throughout a number of our studies.
We have convenings and events. So the convenings include both webinars and in-person events. And we also are developing a microsite that will be available to the public as a centralized resource hub to help with decision making.
Caregiving at Work forum is our inaugural in-person event. It is hybrid. And the event really takes us through the benefit, the caregiving kind of identification and context setting at the start into benefits design and implementation towards the end of the day.
And by the end of the day, we are going to be having essentially a collaborative design thinking session where all of the attendees in the room are going to huddle together, put this enormous brainpower that we have to work and to innovate and pitch ideas on what solutions private market policy could be possible to help improve the financial, physical, and emotional conditions facing caregivers in the workplace today.
And it’s so important for us to bring this cross-sector collaboration together, because EBRI’s role in this is really to be a convener. And we are not an advocate, we’re not a lobbyist, but we want to be able to foster dialogue amongst all of our diverse stakeholders to make meaningful benefits progress and innovation.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Well, it sounds like it’s going to be a great event. You mentioned that it’s a two-year project. What can we expect in, you know, obviously 26 is almost over, what can we expect into 2027?
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
So we’re going to be publishing additional research pieces. So we are going to publish the oversample of caregivers in our workplace wellness survey. We’re going to be publishing some additional collateral on parents in the workplace.
We have a consumer engagement healthcare survey, which really looks at how the healthcare experience of workers. And so that’s also going to have an oversample of caregivers. We are working on some custom projects as well, looking at the complexity of care and how complexity of care impacts utilization of care concierge services that’s in partnership with Wellthy.
And we’re also looking at the satisfaction of backup care users and child care center users with Bright Horizons. And we’re looking at how employer-sponsored backup care impacts the employees’ self-reported sense of loyalty, productivity, absenteeism, financial and mental well-being. And so those are some of the research pieces that we have in the immediate future.
And then looking beyond to 2027, we’ll be having our second forum and really amplifying the research and concluding the end of the year. No, this is very far away, but we’ll conclude with the Capstone publication and have this microsite and resource hub really set up with a number of resources that can improve the decision making for benefits leaders.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, well, it sounds like it’s very comprehensive. I’m excited for the October 22nd kickoff and hybrid event. And look, I’m hoping, Bridget, you and the members of the EBRI team will come back.
We can continue to update the audience about caregiving at work. Thanks so much for joining us. And we look forward to having you back on the program again very soon.
Bridget Bearden, PhD., Employee Benefit Research Institute
Thanks, Jeff.
