When employees find themselves in a situation where their parents can no longer take care of themselves, it’s likely that getting that report ready for the boss is one of the last things they want to do.

Last year, there were about 64.4 million Baby Boomers in the workforce. Many members of this generation – now ages 41 to 59 – are juggling the responsibilities of caring for their aging parents along with their own children and duties at work.

Jan Burch, owner of Jan Burch & Associates, a human resources consulting business, feels fortunate that she had the flexibility recently to take time off from work when her mother-in-law unexpectedly became ill.

“I don’t know how I would ever have been able to handle that situation if I wasn’t self-employed,” Burch said. “When you need to make visits to a hospital, get someone to a doctor’s appointment, pick up a prescription or just do some of the things you need to do to help someone or make them comfortable, it takes up a significant amount of time and can become all-consuming.”

Burch said her clients understood her situation and were willing to reschedule appointments to accommodate her family obligations. Unfortunately, her 92-year-old mother-in-law did not survive her sudden illness and passed away earlier this month. Burch sympathizes for people who go through similar life-changing events and are unable to take as much time off work as they would like to handle their parents’ affairs.

“If I would have tried to keep a normal schedule, I know my productivity would have been down,” Burch said. “You can get easily distracted and think you should be some other place.”

GETTING PREPARED

Statistics show that 40 percent of adults over age 65 will need some sort of extended care. Businesses are recognizing the need to offer flexible schedules or other benefits to employees to help prepare for their future, and in some cases, the future of their aging parents and other family members.

Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield has offered long-term-care insurance as a voluntary employee benefit for nine years, but just over the past six months, employee participation in the benefit has increased significantly.

“Before this summer, when we held an open enrollment for our employees, about 10 to 12 percent of our employees had this insurance,” said Angela Feig, a Wellmark spokeswoman. “But now about 25 percent of all employees have purchased some sort of long-term-care coverage.”

Rick DeBartolo, senior vice president of LMC Co., an insurance brokerage, said although long-term-care insurance is not a new product, it is now gaining in popularity. DeBartolo said the companies he works with may subsidize the cost of an employee’s long-term-care insurance and make the coverage available for purchase to the employee’s spouse, parents and grandparents.

“We’ve seen an increased interest from companies for long-term-care insurance each year over the past five years,” DeBartolo said. “Even if companies aren’t able to pay for part of the cost of it, there are still advantages to sponsoring it because you have the convenience of payroll deduction and you have a unique product that employees probably can’t get anywhere else in the market.”

DeBartolo purchased long-term-care insurance from LMC for himself and his wife, and he encouraged his parents and his in-laws to also sign up for it, which they did.

“I told them that the advantages to buying this plan versus one they could buy off the street is that with a group plan, there’s some concessions on underwriting and a cost savings on premiums based on economy of scale,” DeBartolo said.

He said the importance of this type of insurance really hits home with him because his grandparents, who live in a long-term-care facility, have expenses of about $9,000 per month.

“It’s a wake-up call for you when you go through something like this with a family member,” he said.

WEIGHING THE BENEFITS

Steve Flood, senior vice president of employee benefits for Holmes Murphy &Associates Inc., a West Des Moines-based benefits brokerage, said some of the companies he knows of that have added long-term-care insurance as an employee benefit are offering it on a limited basis to key executives.

“We’re seeing a lot of Baby Boomers concerned about their parents,” he said. “Frequently, they don’t live in the same city as their parents, but they might be ultimately responsible for them. Helping them buy long-term-care insurance is a solution they would rather entertain than having them move in with them.”

But overall, Flood said, the number of companies offering such coverage is still fairly small, even though many have expressed interest in it.

“I think most HR people would tell you that this coverage is very important, but the problem that they face is that there’s no money in the budget to address it,” Flood said. “Such a big portion of benefit dollars are being gobbled up by the cost of medical care, and when companies realize there’s no money in the budget to address it, they kind of go to the next topic.”

Flood said long-term-care insurance can be fairly expensive – about $1,200 to $5,000 per year, depending on a person’s age. As a result, many of the employers offering it are doing so with without subsidizing the premiums. He thinks employees are showing only lukewarm interest in buying it because they can’t pay for premiums the same way they do their medical and dental insurance, using pre-tax dollars from their company’s cafeteria plan.

“If there was a change in the tax deductibility, I think a lot of employers who have looked at it over the years would add it,” Flood said.

Flood said the high cost of long-term-care insurance may also make it difficult for some people to rationalize the purchase of it.

“A lot of the people who need it can’t afford it, and a lot of the people who can afford it don’t need it,” he said. “But some wealthy individuals purchase it to protect their nest egg so they can leave something behind for their families.”

BALANCING ACT

Burch, who is also the president of the Central Iowa chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management, said it works to an employer’s advantage to show consideration for workers’ needs when they’re dealing with finding care for their aging parents. She is encouraged by what she has heard from fellow SHRM members about employers showing increased flexibility and relaxing their definitions of dependent care to allow their employees to use their time off to care for a sick parent similar to what they would do in the case of a sick child.

“If you don’t address these issues effectively as a company, you run the risk of decreased productivity and possibly morale issues,” Burch said. “In some cases, you run the risk of losing a good employee if you don’t show empathy. They may feel like they have no choice but to quit and stay home.”

Tom Farley, the workplace services consultant for Employee & Family Resources, which sells various employee assistance programs to employers, said his company is receiving increased interest from companies that want to offer elder-care assistance to employees.

EFR has a specialized Adult and Elder Care Resources package that companies can choose to purchase for their employees. Through this service, people can have telephone consultations with a clinician who specializes in elder care. The clinician can offer advice on evaluating an elderly person’s care needs, suggest resources and agencies that might be of use and help the person deal with their own emotional needs as well.

At a recent health-care benefit Farley attended on behalf of EFR, he was amazed that about half of the people he spoke with shared their struggles “about what to do with Mom or Dad,” or expressed concern that it was something they were going to be dealing with soon.

“For companies to take on this issue, it will improve productivity, save costs of absenteeism and ‘presenteeism’ and just create a sense of good will and loyalty when the employee sees that their company is willing to help them at a difficult, stressful time in their lives,” Farley said.