Health insurance wasn’t designed to cover everything. That’s why it’s so important to offer supplemental benefits from Aflac. Protect your employees’ finances by helping close the coverage gap.
A 2024 Columbia University and Otsuka report counted approximately 45 million caregivers in the US. Most of them are caring for relatives and loved ones while also working full-time, and employers may not always understand or accommodate them. In a recent conversation at SHRM 2025 in San Diego, experts in various fields from Bank of America, the Milken Institute, and Hanover Insurance, shared how HR leaders can create more inclusive workplaces for caregivers who are juggling elder care, parental obligations, or both.
“Family caregivers are at increased risk for anxiety and different chronic diseases, and in the end, they experience an increase in healthcare costs because of this,” Lauren Dunning, director of the center for the future of aging at the Milken Institute said, adding that caregivers also experience adverse mental impacts, affecting how they show up at work. “They might reduce the hours they work; they might forgo promotions. They might leave the workforce altogether…there’s a $33 billion dollar annual impact of caregiving related absenteeism, presenteeism and turnover.”
Employers can help reduce these potential employee and business impacts in part through expanding which workers can use benefits, according to Cynthia Hutchins, director of financial gerontology at Bank of America.
Over a decade ago, the company expanded its parental benefits to also apply to employees caring for elderly loved ones. Bank of America also offers six hours of free consultation with a geriatric care manager, as well as legal services, that help employees navigate their role as a caregiver. Employees additionally have access to a parent and caregiver employee resource group with 25,000 global members, the company’s second largest.
Hutchins said the resource group leads her to conclude that “there is a very broad swatch of our employee population that needs that support and needs to be able to turn to others within the organization to help them find resources, help them just get ideas on ‘how do I cope with this?’”
Hanover Insurance, a Massachusetts-based company with roughly 5000 employees, also expanded its caregiver benefits in recent years. Denise Lowsley, EVP & CHRO at Hanover Insurance CHRO, wanted to ensure the company retained caregiver employees as Covid-19 took hold in 2020 and put added stress on caregivers.
“As a quick fix, we put a policy in place that said if you needed to go part-time, you can still obtain your full-time benefits,” she said, noting that she thought the benefit would be most useful for parents of young children but quickly realized the benefit was useful for all caregivers. “What started out as niche…turned into an understanding that we needed to be even more broad in our thinking. That was a really interesting segue for us to start to think about what is a caregiver and what are the types of relationships that we should include in our policy.”
After looking through the time off and family care policies, Hanover Insurance also added two extra weeks of family care, with a more “robust definition” of the term ‘family.’
“We really encouraged our managers to use a little bit more discretion and understanding what the need of an employee was in helping to bridge that need with the types of policies and benefits that we have available,” Lowsley said.
“All of the changes that we’re seeing throughout every aspect of our lives, but especially within the workforce, have to do with longevity and the fact that we are living longer,” said Hutchins, who pointed out that Bank of America has five generations of employees working together. “As HR professionals, you have to think of your employee population as all being caregivers, or will be caregivers at some point during their working career.”
