The Six-Month Ask
As boomer ailments mount, family members taking care of them need far more time off than before. How do firms manage a hard balancing act?
The employee asked her manager about potentially taking six months off, to handle a family caretaking situation. Her boss paused, then cleared his throat. “Let me think about it,” he said, even as he wondered how on earth he'd be able to maintain team productivity in her absence.
As Americans turn 75 at a rate of 8,000 per day, their family members are finding themselves bowing under the weight of caretaking responsibilities. Bosses are increasingly fielding questions from employees about long absences. But there’s a larger underlying question leaders are trying to address: Is it okay to allow an employee to disappear for six months? And how the heck should the firm handle the logistics—especially if it doesn’t have an explicit long-term-absence policy? “We’re still trying to strike that balance,” says Dennis Deans, global human resources business partner at Korn Ferry.
To be sure, outside of highly sought-after specialties, it’s an employer’s market. Most employees are job-hugging their way through a tricky economy, and the corporate-turnover rate is 13%, according to one recent survey. But the issue of long-term leave isn’t just growing in terms of frequency. As elderly parents develop more complex illnesses and recoveries, the duration of leave their family members are requesting has reached levels that were once rare. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows workers 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave, and firms with more than fifty employees are required to follow its guidelines. Today, some 68% of firms have established policies for long-term unpaid caretaker or medical leave above and beyond the limits stipulated by the FMLA, up from 44% in 2018, according to the World at Work Total Reward Inventory Survey. A dozen-odd states also offer paid leave for 8 to 12 weeks.
Beyond that, it’s the Wild West. One-third of firms have no policy at all beyond the legally stipulated lengths, though employees at smaller and mid-size companies tend to experience more flexibility and can often strike arrangements informally. While very few employers would be likely to offer six months of paid eldercare leave, says compensation expert Tom McMullen, senior client partner at Korn Ferry, many would likely make special arrangements for valued employees. That’s a strategic shift from just three years ago. “This is increasingly not about leave management, but about retention of key talent,” he says. Forty percent of firms now offer paid caretaker or medical leave, up from 21% in 2016.
Of course, it’s one thing to want to help a colleague—and another to face a half-year employee absence. Experts advise that managers first talk with employees about what they really need. “Though it feels like a catastrophe, people forget that in practice, many employees don’t necessarily need continuous leave,” says Ron Seifert, North America Workforce Reward and Benefits leader at Korn Ferry. For instance, an employee might need to take a parent to chemo on Tuesday and a follow-up appointment on Friday, while juggling their teenager’s physical-therapy appointments; they’ve been sweating bullets trying to do that while maintaining full-time employment. Employers can talk through the employee’s situation, as well as the manager’s coverage needs, and see possible avenues forward.
To structure leaves in ways that benefit both workers and the firm, companies with existing long-term leave policies have creatively combined paid leave with flexible work options. Typically, these provide partial pay for a set period, followed by unpaid leave with guaranteed reinstatement. Flexibility is a key lever for firms, because it is usually cheaper to offer a few months of half-time work than to replace and train the same employee. “If you’re not attending to this employee need, you are fundamentally leaving productive capacity on the table,” says Seifert.
Managers want to point employees to benefits they can cobble together to help the situation, such as banked sick time and EAP services. “We need to deal with these inquiries on a case-by-case, job-by-job basis,” says Deans. Experts point out that managing the team’s workload during the absence is just as critical as arranging the details of the leave itself, lest other employees find the situation inequitable. The goal is to do everything possible to help everyone involved through the period, says Seifert. “Think of it not as ‘accommodation’ but as ‘enablement.’”
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