Why Q3 Might be the Best Time to Audit Your Company's Caregiver Resources
A Strategic Blueprint for HR and People Ops Leaders
🌴 Welcome back to the Summer Sandbox, a new series from #TheFamilyHealthcarePlaybook focused on getting your healthcare house in order. Today's Summer Sandbox is for HR and People Ops leaders.
☀️ For many employees, summer is that time of year for clever out-of-office notifications, extended vacations, and extra work-from-backyard days. However, if you're an HR or People Ops leader, these somewhat slower months in Q3 are actually the perfect window to pilot new employee benefits programs and shore up your workforce's resilience before the fall sprint. Let's start with family caregiving.
💪🏼 According to the Caregiving in the US 2025 report by AARP Policy, Research, and Thought Leadership and the National Alliance for Caregiving, ~63M people—that's 1 in 4 Americans—are family caregivers. And they work for your company. Right now, a significant number of your employees aren't just managing their day jobs. Behind the scenes, they're also quietly serving as "accidental caregivers" for aging parents, grandparents, kids, or other vulnerable family members. They may not tell you directly or discuss it with their colleagues or their boss, but they're struggling, often navigating this hard but important work without a lifeline: no framework, no resources, and no support.
💡 We talk about bringing our "whole selves" to work, and in today's environment, that may mean acknowledging the stressful realities of your employees who are also family caregivers. This isn't just a nice-to-do; it's about the business. When an employee experiences a family medical crisis, it doesn't just affect the employee; it can also negatively impact their teammates, disrupt business continuity, lead to absenteeism, and accelerate attrition. Why wait for a crisis when you can act now?
🌟 This summer, employers can help their employees who are family caregivers by starting a Caregiver Employee Resource Group (ERG), or leveraging an existing one to host workshops that address family caregiving as a key family life stage. Even if you already offer a caregiving concierge resource for employees (thank you, btw!), you can still ramp up your support for employees who may be struggling in silence.
📋 Introducing toolkits like #TheFamilyHealthcarePlaybook during the calmer summer months can help you augment your existing total rewards package and support your employees who are family caregivers or about to be, with the guidance and tools they need to:
✅ Map out family emergency triage plans before a family emergency forces a career compromise.
✅ Plan upcoming time off to support a loved one's surgery or chronic illness treatments, while setting clear expectations for decision-making if the employee is suddenly unavailable.
✅ Organize potentially disorganized family medical histories into a single source of truth.
✅ Connect with an estate planning lawyer to develop important advance directives for healthcare and finances.
✅ Review current health insurance plans and optimize health spending accounts.
✅ Proactively schedule important personal health appointments such as mammograms, colonoscopies, cancer screenings, heart health screenings, and chronic disease screenings.
✅ Manage their own mental and physical health instead of burning out while navigating caregiving and work.
☀️Call to Action☀️
HR & People Ops Leaders: Let's use Q3 to help strengthen your employee value proposition and support your team members who are also family caregivers. I'd love to partner with you or your Family Caregivers ERG to run a summer "Caregivers' Action Lab" or a 90-day pilot program of support and resources to kick things off. My DMs are open: ping me here on LinkedIn or karesha@thefamilyhealthcareplaybook.com
** AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, "Caregiving in the US 2025," July 24
#TheFamilyHealthcare Playbook #AccidentalCaregiver #FamilyCaregivers#HumanResources #WorkplaceWellness #EmployeeBenefits #ERG #TheFamilyHealthcarePlaybook