Last month, I had the wonderful opportunity to present on a topic that I’ve been impassioned about throughout whole career: “Creating Workplaces that Support, Empower, and Retain Caregivers,” at the 14th Annual Greater La Crosse Area Diversity Council Conference.
I’m approaching 2025 eager to engage in more conversations, trainings, and coaching on these topics. I’ll be working on ways to support and empower caregivers with customized coaching packages, providing strategies to thrive through caregiving and work. I also want to support leaders and managers, offering training or coaching opportunities to empower more organizations to deepen their support of caregivers. (Please sign up for my email list to stay tuned.)
Caregiving is an elastic term. To me, caregivers include mothers and all people who provide parental care to young children, of course. But it also includes those doing elder care, caring for a troubled teen or young adult, or taking responsibility for community care, especially for marginalized communities.
We are also caregivers when we share our energy and care through emotional labor at work. Sometimes that’s in our job descriptions, as with social workers, nurses, and arguably customer service and HR—all disproportionately female occupations, not coincidentally.
Sometimes, caregiving becomes part of our job descriptions as we seek to be good co-workers, managers, and leaders who feel called to create caring spaces for people facing a hostile world in our current environment, and/or just people who are going through things personally.
Anyone can be a caregiver at work, at home, or in the community. And everyone should be invited into that life-affirming labor, while also having that labor acknowledged as part of workplace contributions that include innovative thinking, team-building, and problem solving.
But the reality is that caregiving is and has been a gendered phenomenon, with women—on average—doing more than their share of care work in the home and at work.
For example, research shows that women managers are more likely to proactively manage people’s workloads, which helps people dealing with any work-life challenge or transition. And they are more likely to be active proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And DEI work not only supports belonging, thriving, innovation, and talent development, it also creates space and opportunities to support and uplift a variety of caregiving contributions, to the office, and to society.
On the one hand, caregiving can reasonably be described as a burden disproportionately placed on the shoulders of women, and even more disproportionately placed on women of color than on white women. This includes not just childcare, but also elder care. At the same time, as many men and people of all genders know, caregiving has powerful relationship-building rewards. And doing this work, practicing this work, builds emotional intelligence, adding value to the entire culture of a workplace, while positively extending the resources of the workplace into the community.
How can you become more aware of the caregiving work being done by the people you work with? What new conversations can you start about the value of this work and the need to support care workers?
Stay tuned for additional posts on this topic.
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