Almost three quarters of U.S. workers face some kind of caregiving responsibility, they found. Of those, 32% say they have left a job because they couldn’t balance work and family duties, and more than 80% say their responsibilities at home keep them from doing their best at work. And 28% said their caregiving obligations had hurt their careers because they didn’t receive challenging assignments or because they had been passed over for raises or promotions.
Employers, as a result, have to deal with more labor turnover and less-productive workers. Assessing the cost to firms is difficult, but the study suggests it is high. Employers, by and large, are unaware, said Joseph Fuller, a Harvard Business School professor and co-author of the report.
“You start seeing this pattern of costs that I think employers overlook,” he said.
For instance, although 80% of workers said their productivity had been affected by their caregiving responsibilities, just 24% of employers said caregiving was affecting their employees’ performance.
The study, based on surveys of employers and employees, found that younger workers, particularly those aged 26 to 35, were more likely to have left a job because of caregiving responsibilities. Hard-to-replace higher-paid employees and those in managerial or executive positions were also more likely to have quit.
Also, perhaps counterintuitively, more men than women said they had left a job because of family responsibilities.
Caregiving responsibilities are expected to grow, as the nation ages. The Census Bureau projects that for every 100 working-aged Americans, aged 18 to 64, there will be 72 people outside that range in 2030, up from 59 in 2010.
Women now earn 52% of the doctoral degrees and 57% of the master’s degrees awarded in the U.S., but many of them leave the labor force during their 30s or 40s to take care of family and return to work later in life.
With an increasing share of jobs expected to require a college degree or more, the loss of so many women could exacerbate labor shortages, the report said.
Employers have been slow to address what the report calls a “caregiving crisis,” Mr. Fuller said.
Slightly more than half of the employers surveyed said they didn’t track their employees’ responsibilities outside the workplace. Employers said they saw no need to collect data on caregiving or were worried about employee privacy.
As a result, the benefits that firms frequently offer aren’t always the ones that workers want. For instance, 32% of workers who left a job because of caregiving responsibilities said they needed to take care of an elderly person. But only 10% of employers offer subsidies for eldercare, the report said.
Mr. Fuller recommended companies keep data on their employees’ caretaking responsibilities to get a better sense of the costs from employee turnover and lost productivity. That could prompt firms to create programs designed to help workers balance their work and home responsibilities.
“What they’re going to find I believe is there are some really good returns associated with offsetting some of these problems,” he said.
That could lead to new ideas and products designed to help harried workers take care of their families without jeopardizing their careers, he added. “Once [employers] start introducing some of their spending power into the system, you should begin to get some innovation response to the fact that there are new revenue streams out there to tap into.”