The Family Caregiving Solution
November is National Family Caregivers Month! This awareness campaign highlights the many Americans who take care of sick or injured family members.
Did you know?
- About 43.5 million Americans provide unpaid care for an adult or child.
- The average age of a caregiver is 49 years old.
- One in 10 provides care for a spouse.
- While most caregivers are women, 40% are men.
The above statistics1 underscore the importance of The Standard’s Family Care Benefit.
The Family Care Benefit Helps Employees
The Family Care Benefit — exclusive to The Standard — can help companies provide paid family caregiving leave to their employees. It pays a benefit when an employee reduces work hours (and income) to care for a family member with a serious health condition.
Management teams often include executives in the “sandwich generation” — those who have both children and aging parents. Because they may have caregiving obligations to both, these highly valued employees need income protection that will kick in if they take time from work to care for a spouse, child or parent.
Imagine this: A chief financial officer learns his wife has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The executive reduces his hours and pay for a period of time to help care for his wife — and to spend as much time as possible with her.
Or consider this: A marketing director’s teenage son suffers serious injuries from a car accident, resulting in an extended hospital stay. The director needs to cut her work hours and pay so that she can be by her son’s side as he recovers.
The Family Care Benefit, offered with The Standard’s Platinum Advantage GSI, can reduce financial worries that may come with taking time off during difficult times like these.
A Vital Recruiting and Retention Tool
With unemployment rates at historic lows, job candidates can be choosy. How do companies compete for the best employees? One way is to offer a robust benefits package with perks such as paid family leave.
More and more companies — such as Microsoft, Facebook, General Mills and Deloitte2 — offer paid time off for employees taking care of a sick relative. When the non-profit PL+US: Paid Leave for the United States surveyed the 70 largest U.S. employers in 2017, only two had family caregiving policies beyond parental leave.3 In 2018, that number jumped to 10 companies.4
It’s clear that paid family caregiving leave is becoming a vital tool to compete for the best employees. Help your clients stay competitive by offering a solution through The Standard’s Platinum Advantage GSI.
Watch The Short of It: Family Care Benefit. GSI Sales Representative Adam Aschoff discusses why the Family Care Benefit is good for employers and employees.
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