A Workplace Environmental Scan of Employed Carers During COVID-19.

The carer-employee experience has undergone multiple shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study seeks to understand how changes in the workplace as a result of the pandemic have impacted employed carers with their ability to perform both care obligations and paid work responsibilities. Using an online workplace-wide survey at a large Canadian firm, we conducted an environmental scan of: the current state of workplace supports and accommodations, supervisor attitudes, and carer-employee burden and health. Our findings demonstrate that while employees are generally in good health, care burden and time spent caregiving has been higher during COVID-19. Notably, employee presenteeism is higher during the pandemic than it was previously, with carer-employees experiencing significantly reduced levels of co-worker support. The most common workplace adaptation to COVID-19, work-from-home, was preferred by all employees as it allowed greater schedule control. However, this comes at the cost of reduced communications and sense of workplace culture, especially for carer-employees. We identified several actionable changes within the workplace, including: greater visibility of existing carer resources, and standardized training of managers on carer issues.

Places of paid work and unpaid work: Caregiving and work‐from‐home during COVID‐19

Eldercare and places of eldercare have been radicalized with the advent of COVID‐19. Growing concerns about the safety of long‐term care homes, coupled with the continuation of stay‐at‐home orders, mean that carers are reconstructing new meanings and places of care provision. Increasingly for many Canadians, the home is rapidly becoming the nexus of one's domestic, work, and caregiving world. By interviewing working carers (n = 5) living throughout Canada, this study investigates the changing meanings of home as a place for care during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing upon lived experiences of informal carers engaged in the workforce, we observe a blurring of spatial and temporal boundaries between places of work and places of care. Specifically, we note that the integration of carescapes and workscapes into a single domain presents both benefits and tensions to carers, such as increased schedule flexibility and disruptions at work, respectively. Parallel to this, we also explore how previous places of safety and respite, such as independent senior residences and long‐term care homes, are perceived as sites of danger and anxiety due to the vulnerability of seniors to COVID‐19. This dynamic is likely to continue well into the future, as long‐term care homes fall out of favour and carers adopt a more integrated approach to caregiving within their daily lives. Key Messages The home during COVID‐19 has become a blended place, occupied by activities of care provision, paid work, and personal life. This integrated landscape presents benefits to working carers such as increased flexibility, alongside challenges such as a lack of external carer supports. These landscapes may continue in a post‐COVID world, as organizations contemplate continuation of digital/hybridized workplaces and long‐term care homes fall out of favour.

Cost Implications from an Employer Perspective of a Workplace Intervention for Carer-Employees during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In developed countries, population aging due to advances in living standards and healthcare infrastructure means that the care associated with chronic and degenerative diseases is becoming more prevalent across all facets of society-including the labour market. Informal caregiving, that is, care provision performed by friends and family, is expected to increase in the near future in Canada, with implications for workplaces. Absenteeism, presenteeism, work satisfaction and retention are known to be worse in employees who juggle the dual role of caregiving and paid employment, representing losses to workplaces' bottom line. Recent discourse on addressing the needs of carer-employees (CEs) in the workplace have been centred around carer-friendly workplace policies. This paper aims to assess the potential cost implication of a carer-friendly workplace intervention implemented within a large-sized Canadian workplace. The goal of the intervention was to induce carer-friendly workplace culture change. A workplace-wide survey was circulated twice, prior to and after the intervention, capturing demographic variables, as well as absenteeism, presenteeism, turnover and impact on coworkers. Utilizing the pre-intervention timepoint as a baseline, we employed a cost implication analysis to quantify the immediate impact of the intervention from the employer's perspective. We found that the intervention overall was not cost-saving, although there were some mixed effects regarding some costs, such as absenteeism. Non-tangible benefits, such as changes to employee morale, satisfaction with supervisor, job satisfaction and work culture, were not monetarily quantified within this analysis; hence, we consider it to be a conservative analysis.