"Prepare your workplace for your caregiving duties"/ "Afraid to disconnect from work? Why you should get over it"

May 11, 2019 "Prepare your workplace for your caregiving duties": Today I found this article by Guy Dixon in the Globe and Mail:

Imagine your elderly, ailing parent is living independently and coping, just.

You drop by as often as you can (assuming you live in the same city) and wish you could do more, but work and daily commitments are pressing. You buy enough groceries for the week, making sure everything is fine, providing all the care and love that you can, but it is a fraught situation. She depends on your every visit.

Then one day she has a nasty fall and can no longer do the most basic tasks. The entire caregiving apparatus crashes. How can you prepare for this? And as much as you don’t want to think of yourself, how can you also prepare your career for this?

The reality is that our population is aging, and about 50 per cent of Canadians have cared for an aging, sick or disabled family member or friend at some point, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada. 

Women face a larger caregiving burden: The proportion of women who cared for an adult family member or friend on any given day was three times that of men in 2015, according to Statscan. And 43 per cent missed work, 15 per cent cut down their hours and 10 per cent passed up a promotion or new job because of their caregiving duties, according to Statscan.

The good news is that public seniors services are often available to help to some extent with this kind of crisis. Yet, this assistance will still rely heavily on you as caregiver. 

Understanding that is key in coping career-wise, say health-service providers.

So preparing yourself, and, as much as you can, your employer, about potential scenarios, can help you navigate unexpected crises.

“We rely on informal caregivers to be part of the picture, to go and get the medication, to take Mom to the medical appointment, to co-ordinate visit times for different things. We recognize that that’s a real need [for caregivers]‚” said Mark Blandford, executive director for primary care and seniors’ health for Island Health, the public health-care provider for B.C.’s Vancouver Island.

Caregivers should be aware that even navigating available services for elder care can require a major time commitment, given the different options usually available, from signing up for home nursing or having a case worker quickly find room in a suitable care home for your parent (if need be), to recommending temporary respite care and day programs that give time for caregivers to look after themselves. It can be difficult to judge which service to take and how much time you will need away from work.

“We focus on the patient extensively, but we don’t really focus as much as we could on the caregiver experience," said Island Health’s Mr. Blandford. About 93 per cent of the authority’s clients using homecare services have an informal caregiver of one kind or another.

Senior services are also normally geared toward getting a patient back to their place of residency, rather than remaining for days in a hospital. “We’ll move heaven and earth to stop them being admitted to a bed, unless they medically need it,” said Mr. Blandford. This puts further onus on caregivers, possibly requiring more workarounds for your job commitments.

So, keeping your employer closely abreast of your situation is crucial, human resources consultants say.

There are legislated compassionate care provisions for workers, though it is reserved for people caring for people who are seriously ill or dying.

Provinces allow 27 or 28 weeks of compassionate leave for caregivers tending to gravely ill or dying relatives, or to people they consider family.

Federally, some employment insurance benefits are available as a non-refundable tax credit to family caregivers.

Some companies may also have additional policies allowing compassionate leaves.

“While most organizations will defer to the provincial ESA [Employee Standards Act] regulations, different employers will provide access to different types of internal leaves and/or may be flexible in how an employee is using their sick days, personal days and vacation days to cover off intermittent absences from work,” said Sharon Kolodychuk, a consultant in the Calgary office of human resources consulting firm Salopek and Associates.

“Honesty from the employee in keeping their employer apprised of their personal situation, and flexibility from the employer to work with the employee during this period of time, will be critical,” she stressed. After all, the employer still has a business to run.

Yet, communication can also be a difficult conversation, said Lynn Brown, managing director of Brown Consulting Group in Toronto. “I think you have to be mindful of who your employer is.”

An employee doing shift work may find a manager less than accommodating if an employee is juggling various caregiver commitments. Still, employees can take heart in the fact that compassionate care regulations mean that even reticent employers “have somewhat of an obligation to try and be helpful in these situations because people are balancing a lot of things – children and elderly parents – and it doesn’t help if you have a really stressed out employee,” Ms. Brown said.

So, “it’s important for employees, if they are going to talk to their employer, to look at policies,” to see the options available to them, she said.

And it can help with juggling work to realize that you have options beyond what seems to be only one solution. For example, you might believe that your mother, after her fall, needs homecare nursing on the days when you have to be at work. But there may be other options, such as different combinations of day services and respite programs.

It is import to assess all your options, health workers say.

“[We want patients and caregivers] to be open and take the time to have a thoughtful conversation with our care co-ordinators about where they’re at, and what services are available, and to just stay open minded about the different kinds of services that we link people with,” said Megan Primeau, a spokesperson for Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network. (LHIN)

May-Lin Poon, client service manager with the Toronto Central LHIN, stresses it is also important to understand your own caregiver abilities. “When we get those calls [for help], we want to start off by understanding where those supports are, and we want to work collaboratively with those supports,” she said.

No two caregiving situations are alike. Everyone is unique. And most patients and caregivers will only contact senior services when the need is urgent. Yet, for the sake of your career and your own health, it is important to look at a variety of solutions.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/article-working-woman-with-an-elderly-parent-prepare-your-career-for-the/

Jun. 30, 2018 "Afraid to disconnect from work?  Why you should get over it": Today I found this story by Jelena Zikic in the Globe and Mail:

Associate professor, School of Human Resource Management, York University

We are taking fewer and fewer paid vacation days per year. Are we less in need of rest, or is the work culture taking over our lives?

While North Americans in general have fewer paid days compared to many European countries, there is something else going on that seems quite worrisome for our well-being as well as our productivity at work.

Taking time off and fully disconnecting has become more difficult than ever before.

Most importantly, our need to be connected influences not only how we work but also how we take breaks.

One of the challenges facing organizations and leaders today involves employees’ ability to be present, to contribute and fully engage with their work. 

Not only are we constantly multi-tasking, but many organizations also report increased instances of overworked employees, whose health and well-being are constantly deteriorating.

In trying to address some of these issues, several companies have even tried to offer “vacation on demand,” letting their employees choose how long and even when to take time off, in the hope that this will increase productivity and engagement at work.

Thus, the question of how we engage with our time off and how we craft our resting times remains a major challenge. Studies in the area of work and well-being suggest that our brains need a certain amount of uninterrupted time away from work to fully disconnect and recuperate. Upon returning to work we also need time to reconnect and re-enter daily routine.

Quite the opposite seems to be happening in today’s work force.

Taking time off in little spurts seems to be the trend (i.e. taking a day at a time). This new way of resting may not allow for full recovery of our body and mind, much needed by the majority of our working population. The ability to fully disconnect and switch off all our devices also carries a certain amount of fear.

Expectations from employers have changed, and in many cases the established work culture carries expectations that we will respond to any e-mail, even those sent in late evening hours or on Sunday afternoon. These expectations have not only changed how we do our work, but also how we take rest. 

However, the question that leaders should address is whether we are doing ourselves and our workplace a favour by being unable to fully disconnect and take extended periods of time away from work.

Vacation is not only meant to recharge our mind and body, but also helps us to reconnect with others and ourselves, and in return enhances our ability to be productive and more creative once we are back at work.

Therefore, it is crucial that we understand how our work-life equilibrium functions. Our well-being outside of work often spills over to how we engage with work, and vice versa. 

In fact, our relationships outside of work also need nurturing away from it all and in an uninterrupted way. 

This is best achieved once we are away from it all and with little connection to e-mail or work in general. The ability to be present in one place at a time and focus on the now is what we have lost in our contemporary day-to-day routine.

Therefore, next time you plan your vacation days, please consider that you will be doing yourself and your organization a favour if you truly disconnect from it all and take more than just a day at a time.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/leadership/article-afraid-to-disconnect-from-work-why-you-should-get-over-it/