Working Caregivers: The Invisible Employees

Why Employers are Missing the Caregiving Crisis with Joseph B. Fuller

• Selma Archer & Zack Demopoulos • Season 1 • Episode 28

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In this episode, we sit down with Joseph B. Fuller—Harvard Business School professor and co-lead of the Managing the Future of Work initiative—to unpack what most employers are still getting wrong about caregiving and the workforce. Joe brings powerful insights, compelling research, and personal stories that shine a light on why caregiving is a business issue, not just a personal one.

From costly turnover in your top-performing talent to invisible presenteeism draining productivity, we explore the real impact of ignoring caregiving needs—and the strategic advantage of doing something about it. Whether you're in HR, leadership, or caregiving yourself, this episode is full of eye-opening data, practical solutions, and a hopeful look at where the future of work is headed. You don’t want to miss it!

Joseph B. Fuller is a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School and a globally recognized expert on the future of work. He is the co-founder and co-director of Managing the Future of Work, a long-term research initiative at HBS, and the founder and co-head of Harvard’s multi-disciplinary Project on the Workforce. Joe is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His research focuses on workforce development, caregiving economics, AI's impact on employment, and bridging the skills gap. Before academia, he was the co-founder and CEO of Monitor Group, now part of Monitor Deloitte. He is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Business School.

Episode Highlights:

 [0:00] – Joe Fuller explains the costly turnover driven by caregiving
 [1:38] – Welcome and why supporting working caregivers matters now
 [2:28] – Introducing Joe Fuller and his motivation for researching the care economy
 [5:57] – Has progress been made since “The Caring Company” report?
 [6:18] – Encouraging shifts in male caregiving and workplace conversations
 [9:35] – Hybrid work, job design, and the need for flexibility innovation
 [11:25] – Shoutout to Wellthy and the power of solutions from experience
 [13:27] – The power of leadership role-modeling for caregivers
 [14:22] – Differences in caregiving styles between men and women
 [15:49] – Key takeaways from Joe’s “Hidden Workers: The Case for Caregivers” report
 [16:38] – Why annual performance reviews miss the mark—and how to improve them
 [21:08] – Building trust through real-time conversations and support groups
 [22:09] – Resume gaps and how applicant tracking systems exclude caregivers
 [27:29] – Making the business case for supporting working caregivers
 [36:09] – The future of caregiving and the workforce: women, social skills, and AI
 [44:10] – A call to action for caregivers: you're not alone
 [45:34] – Where to find Joe Fuller's work and research

 Links & Resources:

Joseph B. Fuller – HBS Faculty Page: hbs.edu/faculty-profile

 Managing the Future of Work (Project & Podcast):

Project on Workforce – Harvard Kennedy School: pw.hks.harvard.edu

The Caring Company Report: Download the Report

Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent: Read Here

Wellthy - wellthy.com

Joe Fuller:

When you get 50% of your top quartile have left at least one job because they couldn't accommodate caregiving. The most important if you're if you are, your salary structure reflects actual value added. You're losing highly valuable, expensive to replace people, and you don't even know why, because you don't do exit interviews those top quartile people in most companies basically costs a year salary to replace them. To replace them, not to, you know you're going to pay them that salary too. You know, for a lower wage workers, it's more like 25, 30% of a year's salary, but that's a lot of money too. So reducing turnover, you've like reducing scrap in a manufacturing operation? Well, a bunch of that churn is being driven by caregiving responsibilities.

Unknown:

Did you know that in 2020 there were 53 million caregivers in the United States, and by 2025, this number is expected to grow to 62, point 5,000,073% of these caregivers also have a job. They are called Working caregivers, and they are invisible because they don't talk about their caregiving challenges. Working caregivers, the invisible employees, is a podcast that will show you how to support working caregivers. Join Selma Archer and Zach demopoulos on the working caregivers the invisible employees podcast, as they show you how to support working caregivers.

Zack Demopoulos:

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, from wherever you're calling and whenever you're calling. In with us, we thank you for checking out our working caregivers, the invisible employee Podcast. I'm Zach demopoulos And I'm Selma Archer. Hey, Selma, how are you doing out west? Doing great. Looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, we're going to jump right into this. We're no no no banter this morning before we get started. But this is somebody that, someone I have been just so excited to have on our show. But more importantly, for our listeners, our viewers, who are trying to run businesses, manage people, we have a very special guest who who does quite a bit of research in this area, and is going to we're going to talk about all his work and his insights. So we like to bring Dr Joseph Faller to the to the camera here. Hey, Dr Faller, how are you?

Joe Fuller:

Zach, I'm fine, but I'm not a doctor, so, and I've never played one on TV either.

Zack Demopoulos:

So Joe is fine. All right, Joe, it is thank you for that. Well, we're going to get right in is Selma and I have have started our journey in the caregiver space since 2018 and we have to admit humbly that your report the caring company, was one of the first ones that we picked up, and we read from front to back to really try to understand the care economy and what it's all about. And the work you did there was tremendous, and we're going to talk more about some of the work that you've done since then, but let's start there. What What inspired you to to work in this space, and why is it so important to you? Well, it really

Joe Fuller:

started as I was trying to understand what was contributing so much to stagnant workforce participation rates in the United States. Earlier, I had done a couple of large papers on the skills gap, and I began to think a lot of the conventional wisdom that I kept hearing and certainly reading from the consulting firms and the academic papers from a labor economist started with a lot of assumptions that just didn't fit with my lived experience and I had been I went to the Harvard Business School and considered joining the faculty when I graduated, but instead started a consulting firm called monitor, which became quite large, both from as an employer, but also working with senior executives in their knowing what their challenges were. It just struck me that there were some parts of discussion that were mute, and I wanted to look into frankly, it's a it's a part of my interest in the caregiving is my own life story. So my mother was a Harvard graduate, had a master's in economics, was studying to get her PhD in economics. When World War Two started, she got hired by what ultimately became the OSS, which hired a lot of academic thinkers, and when she came back from her wartime service, joined the Harvard faculty with teaching, but when she had three kids, two, who of us survived childhood? You know? Really changed her work life. Then, when I got married to my wife, Ruthann, I was running a consulting firm. She was working for a different consulting firm. She came down with twins as our first kids, and there was a high risk pregnancy. She had go on bed rest, so she went on leave of absence from work, but then the caregiving options for us and the ability of that career to really accommodate someone who wanted to be very active in her children's lives just wasn't there. Happily we were had means so that she could leave her job, but we understood that that was a happy event. She ultimately did work at WGBH in Boston. So it was both, why? Why was women's worth for workforce participation actually falling slightly after two decades of growing and then my my own life?

Zack Demopoulos:

Wow, wow. And what do you think since then, since you've started, you know, we'll talk, you know, caring company. We'll use that as kind of a point in time. But since then, honestly, have you been encouraged or disappointed with the progress that we're making with this work that you're doing, and you've done quite a bit of research, so it's no reflection on what you're doing?

Joe Fuller:

Yep, I would say yes, I'm both somewhat discouraged and somewhat encouraged. I'm encouraged on a couple of fronts. One is the data strongly suggests that more men are making decisions about their careers influenced by caregiving obligations, and more men are doing more, non equal share of work related to household management. It's not close to 5050 but it's a lot better than 99 to one than where it probably was in I don't know 1965 I think these issues are more discussable and that employers aren't so unnerved or taken aback if someone brings up caregiving as a consideration. I think we have some interesting entrepreneurial activity. So yes, they're the care dot coms and the Bright Horizons of the world that are successful companies, but they're also rapidly growing startups. A former student of mine started a company called wealthy Yes, which is specifically targeted at providing people that have a member, family member or personal health care, I won't say crisis, but event that they need help navigating wealthy is doing that and adding service lines. Why am I discouraged? Well, we certainly seen some pretty widespread revision of hybrid and remote work policies and companies. I know a number of companies that have wrestled with that, and I do want to just tell your listeners, most of them have pretty good data for why they're doing it. This is not, you know, Cranky type X managers or a type personalities say, Well, you know, when I was 30, I worked in the office seven days a week, and darn it. You know, my ungrateful employee should do it. It's they're running the numbers and productivity was falling. It was during covid. It was pretty buoyant, but that everyone had a huge adrenaline surge. But afterwards it it backed off. I think that we're not seeing changes in career paths and innovation in in job design, basically, right now, you can work for me part time, or you can work for me full time, or you can work for a vendor of mine who employs you full time or part time. But we're not getting innovation in terms of, you know, I would like to see which is going to sound oxymoronic, full time halftime jobs, hybrids, yeah. How are we going to apply technology to allow older workers who want to stay active and have very important what the economists call specific knowledge of the enterprise, of customers, of working groups of history of the company to if they want to continue to work, but maybe seasonally. So I'm speaking to you from a home that my wife and I own in the Berkshires in the western part of Massachusetts, lovely area. We live right outside of Boston, in the city of Newton, where my wife is the mayor, and I could imagine another, someone else, a neighbor of mine, saying, Yeah, I'm willing to continue to be a corporate lawyer, continue to be a engineer, but I want may 15 to October one. I'm working one morning a week, and everybody knows that. And no. One is saying, why did that? Why do why does he get such a great deal? Because they've got their own deal. And it may be there are two adult household with school age kids, and that person says, I do drop off at school, so I don't want to be expected the given traffic, I don't want to be expected to be at my desk, for sure until 930 I'll probably be there by 845. 90% of the time. We saw in a company that that removed a formal designated holiday benefit, and a lot of people just take holiday as they deemed fit. People didn't abuse it. But they saw some interesting patterns. They saw with particularly people between 45 and 55 a lot of people taking, like, Wednesday and Friday afternoon off in the fall or the spring, they're going to their kids games. I think that there are structural factors that are going to make this is going to encourage companies. Are going to encourage companies to be more innovative in this space. And when big companies start to innovate, that's a market signal to entrepreneurs. And you can see that with wealthy which I think is a great story, and I think I think we may be on the verge of getting a more virtuous cycle spun up here, but

Zack Demopoulos:

thank you for shouting out wealthy. We also want to shout out to Lindsay. We've not met her. Maybe one day we'll get her on the show and talk about the

Joe Fuller:

tremendous be happy to happy to introduce her. I know her very well. She she

Zack Demopoulos:

needs, she's fantastic, and she is definitely a solution. I mean, obviously it's not the one and only, but it's definitely a great solution. But thank you for sharing your discouragement too. We're not we're not focusing on the negative. I just wanted to share with you, Joe, that Selma and I have been actually encouraged by our guests, for example, to your point about taking the afternoon off and going in with your kids, we just interviewed a fantastic person. I don't know if you know him, Paul Sullivan. Shout out to Paul Sullivan. He has started a company called company of dads, where they are lead dads. They're called Lead dads. That's what he and he says, Look, what's wrong with putting on your calendar? I've got to take mom to her cancer appointments, or I've got to I've got to go to my dad social worker meeting at his why not put those into your calendars so it can be visible to everybody and start having conversations around it

Joe Fuller:

exactly. That's a great illustration. I don't know Paul, but I'm excited to hear about him. And one thing I think is clear is when business leaders say I have to take care of my folks. I have a special needs child, and talk about that with their colleagues. They make it discussable, as I said earlier, and having people understand that we employ you. We don't employ you just for eight hours a day. You've got other elements your life, and we want you to be productive. And of course, as we all know, caregiving concerns are a big driver of what we call presenteeism. So I'm at work, but I'm not. My head isn't in the game, and hopefully you're not running a turret lathe or something. So you can hurt someone or hurt yourself. But we that that that role modeling is is so important.

Selma:

Yes, to your point, we recently had a guest who went many, many years as a caregiver in her company, big pharmaceutical in New Jersey, and just suffered through the stress of trying to do both jobs well. And it wasn't until one of her senior leaders came forward and discussed her caregiving situation with her team that this individual then felt comfortable coming forward, and she said it changed her whole life. It just really changed her life. So to your point, that's a really important thing to do the modeling. But my question goes back to something you mentioned earlier about more men stepping into the caregiver role. I just wondered if you see any key differences between the impact caregiving has on women versus men.

Joe Fuller:

It would just be anecdotal Selma, but I think that what my data says is more men are making career decisions and changes in their place of employment or their desired trajectory to take into account caregiving when it comes to actually providing caregiving, I think you do get almost stereotypical responses. So yes, I'll take mom to her oncologist. Yes, I want to go to see my child's soccer. Game or baseball game or whatever else, but that they tend to view it more with a task orientation, and there are things to be done and how we're going to get organized to do them, and that you see the emotional engagement and level of empathy and consistency of concern being more, not universally, but more associated in a traditional heterosexual couple, with a woman caregiver, or with a single, single man versus a single woman, how they respond to these things, that's my sense. But it's not, it's not something that I've actually attempted to isolate into study. Okay, thank you.

Zack Demopoulos:

Speaking of studies, your last one that's come out, what, by the way, listeners or viewers will put links into into our show notes for everything that we've brought up so far, but the hidden workers, the case of for caregivers, first of all, we love your hidden workers no more, because that's what we titled our book, invisible employees. At the end of the day, they are hidden until they become visible. But I like to cover just a couple of things about what your takeaways from from your study there first, and we've just brought up a great suggestion of putting things into a calendar, right? But if a manager isn't prepared, and both Selma and I have worked in HR corporate for a long time, if the manager is not prepared, that could all backfire. So what are you seeing in terms of preparing managers, or what are some great best practices in preparing managers for these conversations, or to be more empathetic?

Joe Fuller:

Well, first of all, that is a that's work you have to invest in that. I think there are, once again, some reasons to be optimistic. A big one is that more and more companies have figured out something that I think has been screamingly apparent for a long time, which is this annual or semi annual performance review really doesn't work.

Zack Demopoulos:

I'm cringing. I don't know if you could see me cringing right now. I did 15 years of HR, trust me, that word makes me cringe.

Joe Fuller:

Well, I can understand why it makes me cringe too, but maybe for different reasons. It, you know, by the time I stepped down as CEO of the firm I founded, yeah, we had 2000 consultants, and it was a big place. And what we had learned over time is that if you gave someone a performance to you every year, the last three months of data was much more amplified in the discussion. No one can kind of remember what happened nine months ago. Often there was a change in the advisor or change in the clients they were working on. So you create a lot of internal transactions, and people's memory change, and people tend to remember things that put them I'm not think saying this because they're cynical, but, you know, people put the best spin on things they do and reasons they did it and and in a lot of people, that becomes over time. And this has been demonstrated by sophisticated psychological research, people start believing that their version of events, is what actually happened, even to the fact that, let's say I attributed to Zach that he was angry with me. Oh, you know it, but I never asked him. Oh, you know, six months later, your memory is Zach was angry, yeah, but so doing a lot of near real time, let's talk about the meeting we just came out of with that customer. This was my impression. What was your impression? I know you knew that this morning's meeting was important. I was really surprised you were late. Is what's up? And when you're having a regular dialog with people, you're inviting them to tell you about not the big sweep of their career and employment. But what is up? Oh, you know, I had to go over to my mom's house because, you know, it turns out she's got an early indication of Alzheimer's. And I, you know, got a list of things I should remove from her house, and I wanted to make sure that her her pills for the week were set up. Then I found that she was confused and not bathed. So I, you know, I stayed Oh, I didn't know your mom lived nearby. Oh, I'm so sorry she's ill. My Dad has Alzheimer's or whatever, so that works, facilitating internal support groups, Slack channels, things, not so they can be monitored. But you know, if you've got a fairly large workforce, why not have an employee group of special needs, kids, parents, why not have bad. Battling cancer, battling Alzheimer's, whatever it might be, you know, let them use your conference room, and and, and if you're a senior executive with that problem, go to the meeting or be the sponsor. Wow. And, you know, buy the pizzas. The vast majority of people and companies you know, want their colleagues to be successful and happy. Certainly, the vast majority of supervisors I ever had and people who manage people for me when I was a CEO, a lot of barriers and a lot of stress per what, what Selma was talking about, happens because they can't. People can't talk about it. They don't feel safe about talking about it. They fear as it, as it says, in caring company, if I'm not mistaken, that people are worried that they'll be viewed as less committed. They'll be cut out of exciting opportunities. You know, they won't be viewed as, maybe on as fast a track. Their subordinates aren't talking to them about their care obligations there. You know, their peers aren't there. So yeah, so if you can unlock that, I think that's a big step in

Zack Demopoulos:

the right direction. So like you said, you got to do the work. You got to do some investment, and it doesn't have to cost money. Everything doesn't have to cost money. I met with a great I want to shout out to an empathy leader, Antoni Savalas, and he taught me a great question that I share with every leader I talk to now, and that is, don't say how you doing. Ask a question like, What was something really tough you went through this week? Let's talk about that, you know. And I'm like that will just open open the gates to have a great conversation. What are they're just again, we could talk to you for hours about your studies. But one more thing about the case for caregivers, the hidden workers, let's go to another segment that's a challenge, and that is the folks that have to take time off from their careers and the gaps. And I know you've talked a lot about this and Selma, and I really appreciate your advocacy for that. What What are companies missing in your research when it comes to the recruiting part and perhaps even the retention part of this great segment of the population, yeah,

Joe Fuller:

gosh, pretty much everything you know the entire process of hiring, particularly in the United States is being engineered to minimize the cost of the process. So before the soft labor market, which has really been soft since the last year, last year and a half of the Biden administration, before, when the market was reasonably brilliant, if a largest recognized name company put out a job posting for a good paying job, you know, high five figure job, low six figure job with a one is the first number, they would get 500 applications. You know, applying for jobs never been easier. And so because ever since, you know monster.com and zip recruiter and those guys got started, the volume of applicants has gone up, and the response has been to create mechanisms to exclude candidates who's going to open 500 emails and print out 500 resumes and 500 responses to questions and read all of them, nobody. So we have something called an applicant tracking system. The applicant tracking system is not generative AI, but it's aI driven. It does things like match the way you describe your skills with the language in the job description. But going back to the 500 the average number of people interviewed by a human being for that job is four. So what happens is you get a pretty big funnel here, and it it comes down to a very little spigot. And so really, the process looks to find reasons to exclude someone. So for 50% of the jobs in the United States, you will be excluded from any consideration, just dumped from the pool of applicants automatically if you have a void for six months longer than six months in your resume.

Zack Demopoulos:

Oh, man, that's tragic, yeah,

Joe Fuller:

for the remaining 50% 50% of the time. So 25% of the total, you will be ranked lower, because the ATS has a include, exclude, kind of in, out filter, and it has a rank on this basis. So if you're only going to get four interviews out of the 500 applications, bank rank lowers, almost like just being excluded. You know, quick tip, the AI is not making a judgment about what you say about the six months. So you can have six months second half of 2025 caring for. Terminally ill parent, and it doesn't see a gap. It doesn't look at that language and say, Oh, that's part of our job description. But at least it doesn't immediately drop you because you thought you were only supposed to put in responses for when you're doing compensated work. All of this manifests itself basically as employers trying to find somebody who's heavily pre qualified to do the work, basically have the precursor job at a competitor or at a elsewhere in the company, or already have the job, maybe at a smaller firm or less distinguished company, or somewhere else, and they need to move. What they fail to understand is their huge number of people who are probably, in some instances, going to be better than the candidate gets through the ATS system in this very constricted interviewing process on eight of 10 or nine of 10 qualifications, they just get excluded because of the 10th. We found consistently that employers that designed specific programs for categories of hidden workers, a classic category is caregiver, but another one's veteran certain types of cognitive or physical limitations that when they developed a program to accommodate those workers, they had a high ROI. The workers were productive and very loyal, because, of course, they understood that the company had worked to allow them the opportunity, and they put great store and value in that.

Unknown:

That's, that's excellent. Thank you. That's, that's, that's good, maybe, maybe taking that a little bit farther,

Selma:

something that Zach and I run across often in our work and in doing this show, is the pushback that we hear about from employers regarding the expense of offering support to their working caregivers. So we wondered if maybe you could talk a little bit about the business case for supporting working caregivers, as well as maybe give a couple of examples of budget friendly strategies that they can implement.

Joe Fuller:

You know, I haven't heard so many excuses since I had three teenagers in the house the unwillingness and stubbornness of companies to do some hard work and some actual data gathering in this regard, is a source of great bewilderment and not a little bit of aggravation on my part. Let's take a look at the data from the caring company, companies. When I would ask executives as having done the research, or when I would have, we have twice annual reunions at our school, so a lot of people come back, and many, many of them are business people, and many of them prominent business people, I would just say to the audience, if someone leaves your company because they've got a caregiving concern, what quartile of your workforce in terms of compensation and responsibility, do you think they're in? 123, or 470, 80% of every audience thinks it's the lowest quartile, which is actually the least likely leaf that's right now, their their logic for saying that was where they probably don't have the resources, and they, you know, they they can't afford to, you know, pay, so they just have to go and take care of the kid, or take care of their parents themselves, or six pounds or whatever. Well, because they don't have the resource, they don't have any choice. They've got to work. But if you but as you know because you've read the report, it's the top quartile, and when you get 50% of your top quartile have left at least one job because they couldn't accommodate caregiving. The most important if you are your salary structure reflects actual value added. You're losing highly valuable, expensive to replace people, and you don't even know why, because you don't do exit interviews. You may have some anecdotal data. Hey, you know, Selma, did you know why Zach quit? Oh, yeah, you know. You know he's got a autistic kid, and it's really hard for his wife to handle it now that she's got a baby. You know, the principal reasons for this are one productivity that if people are unable to address their care needs in a thoughtful way, you know, with some support, they are going to show up for work and they're going to be suffering from presenteeism. So you know, if you've got a sick parent, you know who's living in Florida, living in Arizona, and you know you don't really understand their health care benefit status. You don't understand, you know you've never met their primary care physician. You don't know which hospitals got the best program in something. You're sitting at your terminal and you're not thinking, you're not working, your mind's drifting, and what human beings wouldn't the second is reducing turnover. Those top quartile people in most companies basically costs a year salary to replace them. To replace them, not to, you know, you're going to pay them that salary too. You know, for our lower wage workers, it's more like 25 30% of a year salary, but that's a lot of money too. So reducing turnover, you've like, reducing scrap in a manufacturing operation. Well, a bunch of that churn is being driven by caregiving responsibilities. At least know what, what the reason is, most companies don't do exit interviews, and by the way, a lot of companies get very confused about they and their HR functions are contribute to this, because what they've told a lot of supervisors is, watch what you say, watch what you ask about. You know, you could get in trouble. You know, so if I had a female colleague started asking questions about her health or her children, you know, her her her family status. You know, I might say, Well, gosh, I'd really like to ask, you know, you seem kind of down today, what's going on, but I'm worried that that'll somehow be misinterpreted. And so productivity, turnover, you also just get more commitment, we would always give people no questions asked, often paid leaves in my company. And when people come, we hired a lot from the Harvard Business School because, of course, we knew the school well. People will come back for readings, and they will talk about the time in 1993 that I said, Why don't you just take the summer off, and then we'll meet in the fall, and we'll, you know, we'll keep you on payroll. To them, it was so important in their life that motivated them to come back to work hard if they left, to think well of us to speak well of us or recommend us to people. What you get from employers all the time is the same response that makes sense to me. Prove it, then I'll say, okay, and I got just within a inch of the goal line with a very large retailer. I said, Okay, this is what we're going to do. You're going to give me two regions that look a lot alike in your store network, and we're going to have an a plan and a B plan. And then over a year, we'll study turnover, we'll study we'll do employee attitude surveys. CHRO said yes. CEO said, Yes. Then I've started getting couple layers down in HR and the passive aggressive, this sounds like work to me. Behavior set in. Can't do it inconvenient. Oh, we'll get back to you. Week goes by, oh yeah. We're going to get back to you. Week goes by, oh yeah. And I don't know what was ever said to the CHRO. I, you know, I saw him once. I said, it was a pity that didn't work out. He said, Yeah, that was too bad. But he didn't say, Oh, I heard you didn't want to do it, you know. So for all I know, I don't want to accuse anybody of lying. And maybe one of these people be listening to this podcast if they did lie, I hope they feel bad about it. But I love it, you know now, now people companies like wealthy now have data. So I published a paper using wealthy data that demonstrated that that benefit worked and had a high ROI. And so as we get these kind of entrepreneurs that come up with an offer where few people believe, and I'm sure, if Lindsay wouldn't mind me saying this, but, but you know, the way that she develop accounts is not by going to the benefits manager. You know, she needs to be introduced to the CEO or the CFO or the Executive Committee, and she starts explaining to that group what they provide, and all of a sudden, 123, of the members of that group are interrupting to share their stories and how this really affected them earlier in their career or right now, and that it's really hard, and this really sounds great. And. You know, and it only cost that much per capita. Let's do it then that benefits manager is hearing we've decided to retain wealthy get a contract signed. Now look the benefits managers now. They've got such a hard job and so many challenges, particularly with the way premiums are going up for medical coverage that, you know, I don't want to act as if I think all these people are Stalinist bureaucrats and unempathetic. And, you know, nobody usually accompanies that. Sign up this new vendor with a, oh, by the way, we increase your budget, obviously, to make sure that that you don't have to drop anything else you were you're doing this important is just to find a way to make it work. So that's another way that companies are obtuse about this. To get back to your questions, act that you can't do something meaningful for no effort and no budget. You know you can do little things like the type of self affiliating user support groups and things that I talked about, but you really want to get those returns, you got to invest some money, to save some money.

Selma:

Absolutely, I just have one last question, which is, looking ahead, how do you think the caregiving will shape the labor market and the talent strategies going forward,

Joe Fuller:

profoundly why the world of work is going to get more female. Women are 58% of all college enrollees today. Women are an absolute majority of all masters candidates. They're an absolute majority of all PhD candidates. Not every PhD program. So they're 85% I think is the number for romance language PhDs. They're 20% for computer science PhDs, but all PhDs added up 55% women, and that's true in Germany, and that's true in Italy, and that's true in France, and that's true in the UK. Two thirds of the top decile of performers in American K through 12 systems are women or girls. Two thirds of the bottom decile performers are boys. So in terms of higher ed and educational accomplishment, women are. It isn't even a race. The game's over. Red Sox are out of the playoffs. Usually, when I'm in an audience, I'll kind of take a quick estimate of what percentage of the audience is women versus men, and I'll say I'm about to say something else. Which one percentile of you is going to say you're kidding me, and the other percentile is going to say, you teach at Harvard, and you think that's smart. Everyone knows that, and that is that women outperform men in a very broad and important category of skills called social skills. Sometimes they're so called soft skills. A lot of literature refers to themselves skills. I don't like to use that term, other than to criticize it, because, to me, gives a misimpression. This is not EQ, is part of it, but just the ability to deal with human beings across the board, spontaneous written, oral communication, going into an unfamiliar group and being able to participate without getting embarrassed negotiations is often put in a not negotiating a new contract for a football quarterback. But how do I? How do I have a hard conversation with a customer or colleague or vendor, and it's, you know, I don't just surrender and we get to a decent answer, and I can articulate my position well in most testing, women outperform men on a wide variety of social skills by 25 to 35% and social skills are becoming one of the CO heads of one of My Harvard projects. Is a brilliant labor economist called David Deming. I probably won't live long enough to see him get a Nobel Prize, but I bet he does. And David did a super high profile study a few years ago looking at the nature of jobs and what jobs were gaining share of the labor force and what sorts of jobs we're gaining share of payroll. So what? What are the jobs that are growing the fastest? What are the attributes of the jobs that are growing the fastest and also getting a bigger slice of the pie consistently? The winning combination is jobs that require high social skills and high numeracy. Importantly, the second fastest grower with positive growth was high social skills, low numeracy. So you're going to need to be more educated in the future. You didn't necessarily need a degree, but you're going to need to. To be able to learn, have a track record of learning, because my career now is going to cause me to have to keep learning more often, and the better, more refined your social skills are, the more likely you are to be in an important job. Women are material ahead on both axes. So if I'm looking for, you know, college graduate job or PhD or a medical doctor, my applicant pool is going to be more female, and women still are more likely to end up changing careers or changing their career path because of predictable caregiving obligations, raising children, parents, other relatives. You know, sick spouse that actually you can track demographically. You know if, if your parents were in their early 30s when you were born, you are likely to be bumping into caregiving in your late 40s, early 50s, obviously childbearing years. We know that there is a unfortunate, tragic, you know, surge of serious illness that starts around the late 40s, early 50s, for a material percentage of the workforce of 567, 8% so I've got a spouse with cancer, a medical problem that is going to need treatment. This all suggests that companies are going to have to understand that job descriptions and career paths that really are still have the DNA of the 1960s have got to just be reformed. And AI is going to help in so many ways. It's going to help make caregiving easier. It's going to help eliminate a lot of information gaps that cause there to be lots of transaction costs, and it's obviously going to have a huge impact on on Life Science products. It's going to make finding resources, understanding problems easier. It's going to allow companies to do much better predictive analytics on their workforce. It will, it also will very much help with the hidden workers problem, because what happens in the workforce is that companies rely on limited sets of criteria, really, to hire people. There's very often things like years of experience and where you went to school and what degree did he get, and in early career, what kind of grades did you get to end on a hopeful note, technology is going to address a lot of the things that make life more difficult for working caregivers, but what really needs to change is the attitude and The understanding of the all in economics of employers, and hopefully will steep keep getting existing proof like wealthy, which will make it a smart thing to do, and will key in, and I think the fact that you'll have more women as the desired candidates when they come out of school, so when they're beginning to get close to childbearing years, if they're going to have children, and as they get into higher management, because they've got the social skills that are going to be more and more required of technology eliminates parts of jobs. Leaving social skills is a bigger and bigger percentage of what's needed to be a success because the technical tasks are being offloaded, then you'll get the you'll get a more empathetic and hopefully smarter set of decision makers.

Zack Demopoulos:

So appreciate your insight into the future. Appreciate that hopeful theme that you just gave us, especially the call action that you're given to employers. Really appreciate that, Joe, why don't we end on this? How about a call to action of hope to our working caregivers who are listening to what would you say to them? I

Joe Fuller:

didn't appreciate the breadth of this and the impact of it until I did the research that you're not alone. I mean, there are people up and down the corridors of where you work, up and down the shop floor, of where you work, that are facing similar problems that you shouldn't be frightened to raise these things. In fact, keeping it kind of to yourself and trying to cover it up is going to just make your life more difficult and demanding, and you're denying yourself the possibility of getting some help or support, and that a thoughtful boss or employer, someone you want to work for, will listen and will consider your situation. I'm using that word very advisedly. They're not necessarily. Early. Just going to say, I can deal with that. I can handle that. Let me worry about it. They may say, I really can't figure out how I can handle that, but they'll consider it. And if they won't consider it, and if they immediately start saying, Why are you telling me that that's not my problem? You don't want to work for them anyhow. Well, Said. So the the the you ought to be looking for another job because you're working for a jerk or a company that doesn't have any doesn't stand for anything. That call to action.

Zack Demopoulos:

We're going to end on that. Joe, that was fantastic. Thank you so much.

Selma:

Thank you definitely. You bet my

Zack Demopoulos:

pleasure. Joe, where can people find out more about you in the work you're doing? Unsurprisingly,

Joe Fuller:

if you just kind of Google or get on and you know, perplexity or or open AI and say, Joe Fuller, Harvard University, Harvard Business School, future of work. And then there's a project called Managing the future of work at Harvard Business School, which also has a project site. We have about 275 podcasts that are accessible through that site, we have a eponymous podcast called Managing the future of work. It deals with lots of different issues, including caregiving. You can poke around and may find things of interest. And there is a link on my faculty bio page where you can send me a very short message if you had a question. And obviously I'm on LinkedIn and the service formerly known as Twitter, so in any case,

Zack Demopoulos:

we appreciate you sharing all that. We hope that you'll come back as a few, as a future guest, and give us an update on the on the responses to your call to actions. Let's hope so, right?

Joe Fuller:

Well, I'll hope you'll you'll be able to reciprocate that there have been some positive responses.

Zack Demopoulos:

We'll share them with you for sure. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you both.

Unknown:

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