Manage work and family caregiving

Taking Care of Elderly Parents at Home

Workplaces where people matter

The struggle to manage work family caregiving conflict is rising as remote workers find themselves increasingly responsible for the care of elderly parents.

GOLDEN, CO, USA, November 18, 2020 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The struggle to manage work and family caregiving conflict is rising as remote workers find themselves increasingly responsible for the care of elderly parents. Worries about keeping a job mean that working caregivers are stretched to accommodate work, family, and caregiving responsibilities. Corporations find themselves navigating the new challenges of managing a remote workforce while being sensitive to work family issues without crossing professional boundaries.

Working Caregivers Are Stretched by Family Responsibilities and Work

While working at home may offer employees scheduling flexibility, some find themselves working longer days to accommodate trips to deliver groceries and prescriptions to aging parents hesitant to leave their homes. Other remote workers are combining households to live with parents who need care.

Living with elderly parents offers its own set of complexities for employees who now work at home. Balancing the distractions of children attending school from home and elderly parents living in the house who need attention can make working, caring for an elderly parent, and taking care of family feel like an impossible task.

Healthcare workers who are required to be on-site experience the additional concern of bringing COVID into the family home. After nearly a year of living with COVID, caregivers become exhausted with what appears to be imperfect options for taking care of elderly parents. Withdrawal, a lack of goals, and motivation are affecting home and work responsibilities.

Companies Pivot to Create Workplaces Where People Matter

The realization that a remote workforce may be a permanent reality is causing companies to rethink concepts surrounding engaging, motivating, and managing work teams from afar. While some employees express an interest in returning to work in an office environment, others have become used to juggling work and caregiving from home.

The benefits of a lack of commute, not to mention spending less on work clothing, food, and other work-related expenses, now outweigh the desire to work in a traditional office setting. While many admit to missing the socialization that an office environment offers, practicality and convenience have become new wants for employees who work from home.

What Does Remote Work Mean for Employers?

Online meetings and working at home have brought personal lives into the workplace. Who hasn’t been on a Zoom call when children walked across a room in the background, a doorbell announcing a delivery person sounded, or a dog barked? Remote work in an imperfect home setting—like working at the kitchen table or in a bedroom—can decrease employee productivity.

Employees who previously required a high level of 1:1 contact or direction, now report struggling in this remote environment where they may not talk to or see co-workers for days absent a formal online meeting. This isolating environment can make progress difficult for work teams where frequent collaboration is beneficial.

Managers who succeeded in a face to face environment with employees may not possess the skills to manage employees in a virtual world. Managing teams, employee retention, hiring, and onboarding new employees in a remote setting require different skills. What steps is your company taking to close gaps in manager skills? Employees leave bad managers and companies lacking clear leadership in times of change.

Being sensitive to work at home situations is a new area for managers to navigate. Skills of emotional intelligence become more important for all employees who are no longer face to face but participating in phone to phone or computer to video call communication. How is your company addressing these changes?

Online Employee Development and Learning Offers Support for Managing Work Family Conflict

For companies committed to developing a high-performing workplace, The Predictive Index offers a path forward to link corporate strategy to people strategy. Regardless of the challenges facing organizations today, the Predictive Index Talent Optimization platform provides solutions to achieve transformation.

Imagine supporting engaged and high-performing work teams in a remote environment. Visualize managers with the skills to develop employees for internal succession plans. What about using internal data to identify the skills of high performers so that you can use this information for hiring and training.

Match these concepts to supporting employees working at home who face various work family conflicts specific to elder care. What if these employees had access to online caregiving courses that solved many day-to-day issues that distracted them from concentrating on work projects at home?

Creating the Best of Both Worlds for Corporations and Working Caregivers

Pamela D. Wilson offers the best of both worlds for corporations and working caregivers. Wilson is an entrepreneur and a business owner who successfully navigated remote work—before remote work was commonplace—and who has developed programs and supported working and family caregivers for more than twenty years. Wilson is a caregiving expert who connects with working and family caregivers about the challenges of navigating work and personal life.

She provides corporations support with the Predictive Index talent optimization platform and eldercare. The benefits of improving teamwork and interpersonal skills cross from the workplace into the personal lives of employees. Providing eldercare support bears a financial return for corporations who lose highly talented employees because of a felt need to quit a job to care for elderly parents.

Are you interested in creating a win-win situation for your company, your remote workforce, and working caregivers? Contact Wilson today to learn more.

Information about elder care programs for the workplace, The Predictive Index talent optimization program, Wilson’s weekly radio program The Caring Generation^®, her book The Caregiving Trap: Solutions for Life’s Unexpected Changes, and other programs is available by calling Wilson directly at 303-810-1816, emailing an inquiry to Inquiry_For_Pamela@PamelaDWilson.com, or visiting www.PamelaDWilson.com

P Dombrowski-Wilson
Pamela D. Wilson, Inc.
+1 303-810-1816
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Managing Work Family Conflict