How society can help working care providers handle coronavirus pandemic strain

The inevitable increase of the burden of care during the pandemic affects employees who are pulled between their personal and professional responsibilities
Company- and government-level interventions are essential to creating an environment where people with caring responsibilities feel supported

Nerice Gietel

Published: 4:00am, 24 Jun, 2021

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Most of us have seen headlines, and perhaps even research reports, on the impact of Covid-19 on women in the workforce. In various countries, large numbers of women have left the workforce because of the pressures of caring for and home-schooling children.

What has received less attention is the impact of the pandemic on people who carry out other types of caring responsibilities. Because of a combination of cultural norms, family values and the limited availability of state support for care, the burden of care in East Asia is disproportionately placed on the family and, within them, women in particular.

It is well-known that the population in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and other parts of East Asia is ageing rapidly. Fertility rates are at an all-time low in many of these places.

The Chinese census published last month revealed that the scale of ageing is increasing and is forecast to grow even more rapidly. This is a natural consequence of people in the so-called sandwich generation not being able to “do it all” – that is, care for children, have a full-time job and care for other family members who cannot care for themselves, including ageing parents and grandparents.

In the workplace, this inevitable increase of the burden of care affects employees who are pulled between their personal and professional responsibilities. Negative consequences for these employees can include heightened stress, depression, lack of engagement, presenteeism and more serious forms of mental illness.

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These in turn affect coworkers and leaders who themselves might have caring responsibilities. As former US first lady Rosalynn Carter said, “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers and those who will need caregivers.”

I delivered a webinar on the subject of burden of care as part of the Women in Finance Asia 2021 Diversity and Inclusion Forum on May 6. As part of the session, I asked the participants to give examples of the challenges that leaders face amid an increasing number of people with caring responsibilities at work.

The examples given included communicating openly; dealing with the perception of unfair allocation of work between those with caring responsibilities versus those without; adequately measuring performance; and the impact of uncertainty in planning arising from the availability of team members with caring responsibilities.

We then turned to the question of what can be done, and by whom, to support the growing number of people with caring responsibilities at work. The need to establish or review family support policies immediately came into the discussion.

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At a company level, flexible work and leave arrangements, insurance coverage and employee assistance schemes can help employees with caring responsibilities. Governments can play a role by relaxing migration policies to ensure an inflow of foreign labour to help the care sector grow. Investing in more care facilities and support services and in gerontechnology is also necessary.

Given that the challenges of balancing work and life responsibilities affect more than just the growing number of people with caring responsibilities themselves, it is important to consider more broadly what needs to be done now to support everyone who is affected by the increase of people with caring responsibilities at work.

The rate at which we are seeing an increase of the burden of care in the workplace requires immediate and collaborative action. For this reason, I asked the same workshop participants to share what they could start or stop doing straight away to support people with caring responsibilities at work.

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Suggestions included offering more emotional support, listening to staff, being an example as a leader and not making assumptions of the narrow definition of carers, such as that only parents with young children have caring responsibilities.

The extensive list that emerged within minutes of me posing the question showed that when individuals understand how something can affect them personally, they are able and willing to find ways to effect change immediately. Company- and government-level interventions are essential to creating an environment where people with caring responsibilities feel supported, but these policies alone will not do the trick.

Rather, it will require a concerted effort by all. As Mother Teresa is often credited as saying, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

Nerice Gietel is an executive and return-to-work coach. Her work with employers focuses on how they can support their employees to better combine work and life commitments and, in return, to get more back from them

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