With as many as 600 unpaid carers quitting their paid jobs everyday to care for others, UK employers have a problem.
What’s worse is that this employee exodus is likely to be an issue that many employers are not fully aware of yet.
Data from Carers UK and the 2021 Census shows there are at least 2.5 million unpaid carers across England and Wales who are also holding down a job. Other estimates put the figure closer to 6 million.
In the first episode of the Benefits Unboxed podcast, special guest Madeleine Starr MBE, director of Carer Services at Carers UK, unpacks exactly what is going on in a conversation with podcast co-hosts Claire Churchard, editor of Benefits Expert, Carole Goldsmith, HR director at the Royal Horticultural Society, and Steve Herbert, industry veteran and reward and benefits consultant.
They dig into why so many colleagues that care for someone else outside of work are seemingly invisible, including the ones who don’t even recognise that they are carers themselves. They outline the solid business case for supporting unpaid carers at work and share expert advice on how to ensure the support people need is available and signposted.
With at least one in 10 of the working population in this relatively hidden group of employees, the first challenge can often be recognising your unpaid carer colleagues. Benefits Unboxed asked Madeleine Starr MBE for her signs to look out for that indicate an employee is also an unpaid carer.
Identify your carer colleagues
She said: “Line managers have a significant part to play in recognising when an employee might be stressed, or have more absences than usual, for reasons that maybe aren’t entirely clear.
“[It could be] someone that is turning down training opportunities in a way that might not be expected.
“Or someone who is turning down opportunities for promotion, which you wouldn’t expect in any workplace.”
Starr said that one answer to recognising carers, and helping them to recognise their own status, is to have a carer aware and carer friendly working culture.
“This is a culture where it’s recognised that caring is a thing,” she said.
“I’m not going to argue that this was easy for childcare because we all know that it wasn’t. It took decades and decades before it was accepted that people had children and that was okay. that people come back to work after having children and that we needed to do something about that if we were to bring them back into the workplace.
“We need to do the same with caring because it’s going to happen to most people.”
She explained that no one thinks much about taking on caring responsibilities and most people don’t know it’s coming. “Then it does, and it can totally overturn your life,” she said.
Starr said that most people don’t know where to go for information and advice because they’ve never thought about it at all. But employers have a key role to play in signposting people to the information they need.
“As employers, we all really need to understand that this is coming the way of most of our employees at some stage. So why would we not just plug this in. Why would it not be part of our DNA in terms of the support, energy, the benefits that we offer our employees? So that culture, that carer aware, carer friendly, working culture, is critical.”
- For more on the business case for employers to support carers at work, resources for employers to support unpaid carers, and how the carer’s allowance scandal could be resolved, listen to the full Benefits Unboxed podcast from Benefits Expert.
