In 2014, Liz O’Donnell’s parents both received a diagnosis of terminal illness. Looking back at what came next, “working and caregiving was the most difficult career challenge I’ve faced, ever,” she reflected. Her experience led to a book, Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents While Making a Living, and the Working Daughter support community.

The community O’Donnell built speaks to a larger issue across the workforce: While employees face many types of caregiving demands, they’re not often talked about, accepted, or prioritized. “Elder care,” as O’Donnell pointed out, “is still invisible in the workplace.”

O’Donnell joined four other women thinking about caregiving and the workplace, alongside moderator and journalist Lydia Dishman, for a From Day One conversation titled, “How Employers Can Support Workers in Their Caregiving Roles.” They not only discussed the challenges but also the opportunities as the Covid-19 pandemic has forced employers to rethink how employees show up at work and deal with demands at home.

Dishman kicked off the conversation with a pre-Covid statistic: as of 2020, about 45% of employees were also caregivers. Now, she said, “as we collectively experience the so-called Great Resignation, employees have more leverage than ever to get specific needs met both personally and professionally—and among those needs is the ability to care for our loved ones.”

What does it mean to prioritize caregiving in the workforce? The panelists stressed the need for flexibility, unique approaches to meet different needs, and compassion.

At Northwell Health, that meant listening to employee resource groups and survey responses that stressed the need for flexible benefits. “It’s not the cookie-cutter benefits,” said Diana Witkowski-Grubard, Northwell Health’s director of HR. Over the past two years the company has introduced backup child care, backup elder care, and partnered with a group to provide subsidized child care, which also has an elder support component.

“We’ve taken another approach in terms of our education,” Witkowski-Grubard added. “With our financial well-being aspect, we’ve added a caregiving component so we often have caregiving seminars.” The company also set up a caregiver support fund, where employees can donate or fill out an application to request funds.

Synopsys, an electronic-design automation company, worked with a partner company to offer support systems for employees supporting people with neurological differences. “The materials online, really any parent could use them,” said Kerstin Aiello, the director of North America benefits. Aiello also started a sick and emergency backup program for employees, which quickly took off and is being continued.

Sara Ahlfeld, the head of benefits in Canada for Sanofi, a global health care company, is just beginning to expand the company’s caregiving support. Although there were company concerns about the cost, Ahlfeld has been able to secure backup childcare and eldercare at reasonable rates the company can discount for employees. “We were able to find providers that were able to offer discounts,” she noted.

Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, the chief executive of Wellthy, which provides personalized support to help tackle the logistical and administrative tasks of caregiving, stressed that “what we saw through the pandemic is that families were struggling to get care infrastructure—to get care, period, and not backup care.” She pointed out that there have been massive shortages in day care, elder care and special-needs care. “I think backup care is helpful but we’ll continue to see employees struggle just to set up that care infrastructure.”

Panelists also discussed how leadership and managers should make space for caregiving. Synopsys provided guides and questions on “exactly the questions to ask,” according to Aiello, for employee needs, as well as needs within the household and what kind of flexibility would best fit. At Sanofi, training will help managers navigate those conversations. “We want to say it’s okay to get personal, without overstepping the boundary that the employee is comfortable with,” said Ahlfeld.

Jurist-Rosner recommended that leadership teams make a larger statement on the topic. “To say that the company sees caregivers and wants to support caregivers, it opens up the dialogue and normalizes the discussion,” she said. “It makes a huge impact for managers and team leaders to feel comfortable to have conversations about caregiving and find solutions for their own needs.”

As O’Donnell put it, her wish for managers is that “they had the courage and the strength to just listen, and not be afraid of me.”

Centering, listening to, and supporting caregivers should be looked at as a value proposition, the panelists agreed. A focus on frontline workers is also key. “I would argue that caregiving support is more important for those workforces, because of the fact they don’t have flexibility,” Jurist-Rosner said. “One critical thing is to provide benefits that have different modalities of engagement.”

It emphasizes the need for companies to be responsive to unique caregiving situations across the board. “We’re looking for vendors who can meet all the needs,” Aiello said. “It shouldn’t be just one thing— there should be something there for every type of family.”

Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.