Working Caregivers: The Invisible Employees

Caregiving Doesn’t Show Up on a Claim Line with Geri Stengel

• Selma Archer & Zack Demopoulos • Season 1 • Episode 41

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Caregiving touches nearly every workplace, yet it remains one of the least recognized drivers of employee burnout, absenteeism, turnover, and declining performance. Forbes contributor Geri Stengel joins us to discuss why caregiving often goes unseen by employers and what organizations may be missing when they focus on symptoms rather than root causes.

Drawing from years of research, reporting, and personal experience, Geri shares eye-opening data on the growing caregiving population, the business risks of overlooking this workforce segment, and the opportunities available to employers willing to take a closer look. Whether you're a leader, HR professional, manager, or caregiver yourself, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on one of the most pressing workforce challenges of our time.

Episode Highlights

[1:32] - Welcoming Geri Stengel and discussing the Forbes article that inspired this conversation

[2:18] - Why caregiving remains one of the most common yet invisible challenges in today's workforce

[3:00] - Geri shares her personal experience caring for her aunt and navigating the complexities of elder care

[4:53] - A look at caregiving support programs and innovative solutions emerging through Medicare-funded services

[6:56] - The story behind the phrase "Caregiving Doesn't Show Up on a Claim Line"

[7:50] - Why employers often address the symptoms of caregiving challenges instead of the root cause

[9:17] - Real-world examples of caregiving being mistaken for poor performance in the workplace

[10:24] - The financial impact of caregiver burnout and the hidden costs organizations often overlook

[11:38] - The rapid growth of the caregiving population and why employers can no longer ignore it

[12:03] - How caregiving affects leadership pipelines, retention, and mid-career professionals

[13:58] - Research findings that changed Geri's perspective on caregiving and workforce strategy

[15:06] - Growing investment in caregiving solutions and why the industry is gaining attention

[16:17] - Practical advice for CEOs and HR leaders looking to better understand caregiving risk

[18:39] - Why caregiving develops leadership skills and should be viewed as an asset, not a liability

[19:44] - The long-term consequences for employees, companies, and society if caregiving remains invisible

[21:58] - Geri discusses VentureNear, women's health advocacy, and her continued research efforts

[23:29] - Final thoughts on creating workplaces that better support working caregivers

Links & Resources

Geri Stengel's Forbes Article: Caregiving Doesn't Show Up On A Claim Line. That's Costing Companies And Employees
https://www.forbes.com/sites/geristengel/2026/04/28/caregiving-doesnt-show-up-on-a-claim-line-thats-costing-companies-and-employees/

Ventureneer
https://ventureneer.com/

Geri Stengel's Substack: Women's Health & Market Visibility
https://geristengel.substack.com/

Episode 12: Navigating Caregiving, Work, and Mental Health with Dr. Madhavi Vemireddy
https://workingcaregivers.buzzsprout.com/2401927/episodes/16675698-navigating-caregiving-work-and-mental-health-expert-insights-with-dr-madhavi-vemireddy

Episode 35: Supporting Working Caregivers with Real Empathy
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2401927/episodes/18726675

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow the podcast and leave a review. Remember to check out our website at invisibleemployeeadvocates.com for more resources and subscribe to our newsletter for updates! We’ll catch you in the next episode.

Unknown:

A company might invest in mental health benefits, run a retention campaign, put someone on performance improvement plan, and still lose that employee six months later, never understanding why. If you can't accurately diagnose what's driving turnover and absenteeism, you can't design the right response. You're solving the wrong problem repeatedly, 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 and whenever you are dialing in. We thank you.

This is Working Caregivers:

The Invisible Employee Podcast. I'm Zach Demopolis,

Selma Archer:

and I'm Selma Archer.

Zack Demopoulos:

Hello, Selma. How are you?

Selma Archer:

I'm great, Jack. How are you doing?

Zack Demopoulos:

I'm doing great. We rarely get reporters and writers on our show. We've had a couple, and we have a great one today. So, we're going to get right to Jerry, aren't we?

Selma Archer:

Yes, we are. You

Unknown:

are. We are

Selma Archer:

welcome, Jerry.

Unknown:

Thank you. Thank you, Selma,

Selma Archer:

Zach, and I was so excited to read your Forbes, your most recent Forbes article. You have so many, but the one that really excited us and moved us to give you a call and see if we could have a chat with you with our audience is the one titled Caregiving doesn't show up on a claim line that's costing companies and employees. One of the statements that you made in that article, you said that caregiving is described as the most common and the most invisible condition in the workforce. So, why do you think caregiving is still a struggle for companies to see as a legitimate business concern?

Unknown:

So, part of it is definitional, employees are used to employers are used to thinking about workforce challenges as discrete identifiable conditions, something that would show up in a diagnosis code or a lead request. Caregiving doesn't do that, as I wrote in my Forbes article. Caregiving doesn't show up on a claim line, nearly three quarters of employees have some caregiving responsibilities for most companies that makes it the most common condition in the workforce and the most invisible. I know this personally. In the early 2000s I managed the care of my aunt. New York City was then the only place in the country paying for 24/7 days a week live in caregiving through Medicare, that program no longer exists. So I know some of you were sort of going jealous, but I will talk about another company that has its own version of that, I had to hire an elder care lawyer just to get through the approval process that cost roughly$10,000 The experience is part of why I had such a strong reaction when I interviewed Jenny Lee, founder and CEO of Hera, for the secret Medicare benefits, saving families from elder care's hidden crisis. She discovered that Medicare chronic care management billing codes could be used for caregiving. For me, that was a genuine, where was this 25 years ago moment. The other piece is cultural. We've been, we frame care of it giving as a private family matter for so long that when it bleeds into work, employers tend to see this symptom, that the symptom without connecting it to the cause. Dr. Monhave, then ready CEO of Clio put it clearly. Sometimes they see it as a performance issue. When you dig deeper, you realize caregiving is the root cause, and they're doing it with any support.

Selma Archer:

That's a patch response. I mean, you have so many things that, yeah, that you share with us. There just quickly as a follow up, is there still any type of state level support for caregivers? I thought there were like three states that had some paid leave for caregivers, and New York was one.

Unknown:

Yeah, so off the top of my head, I don't know. I'm no longer working in a big company, and I don't have staff, so I don't have. To offer those kinds of services, but through Jenny's company, Hera, she does provide within New York State, and it's rolling out into other states as the infrastructure within those states agrees to work with Hera, and she gets big name hospital institutions to do that, I think. Next up might be New Jersey and Connecticut, but in New York State, her AI platform uses Medicare codes for chronic conditions to pay for caregiving.

Selma Archer:

Great, thanks for sharing that.

Zack Demopoulos:

Oh yeah, thank you so much, and thank you for sharing a story about your aunt, and that's a powerful story. And if I told you, if we got a dime for every time somebody told us where was this stuff before, we sell them, and I'd be rich, but I, so I ran a home care business for 13 years in the state of New Jersey, and so unfortunately, and you just did a really nice job of clarifying, most families think Medicare is going to take care of us, don't worry, you know, but that is not the case at home in the majority of this country, unfortunately. Now, Medicaid, different program, and that's a different conversation, but I'm so glad that you did share with that, and shout out to New York for that, and shout out to Dr. Van Maretti, who is a big friend of our podcast, she's been on our show. Oh yeah, and and what she pointed out about performance is so important, because we do have HR listening in, and many times we do misconstrue when people are tanking all of a sudden, you know that it's a performance issue, but at the end of the day, it's not. It's usually a caregiving issue. So, first of all, love your title. I mean, it's so eye-catching. I don't know what made you think of that, but love how you say caregiving doesn't show up as on the claim line.

Unknown:

So, I have to, I have to give credit where credit is due.

Zack Demopoulos:

Please,

Unknown:

yeah, it was really her PR person, her comms person, over and over. He was croaked to say that line. I did not know that until afterwards, when I reconnected with the comms person, and she said to me, I made her say it over and over throughout the conversation, and she said, I was so proud when you picked it up in the headline,

Zack Demopoulos:

we're stealing it. Just hear it out. We've made that point a couple of times when we're talking to employers, like you're not going to see this in the claim line, which you made a very good point about. Instead, what you're going to see issues are like what we just talked about: performance issues, absenteeism, presenteeism, mental health issues, turnover. Why do you think the distinction is so important for business leaders to understand that?

Unknown:

Because if you're not treating the symptom and not the cause, you're spending money without solving the problem. A company might invest in mental health benefits, run a retention campaign, put someone on performance improvement plan, and still lose that employee six months later, never understanding why the cost is real, but it's filed under the wrong name for employers still waiting to see caregiving on a claim line before they act. The evidence is already there. It's just misfiled, and that's not a somatic distinction. It has real strategic consequences. If you can't accurately diagnose what's driving turnover and absenteeism, you can't design the right response. You're solving the wrong problem repeatedly. L. Labor, co-founder of Alexa, a Dallas-based workforce strategy firm I covered in a Forbes piece, caregiving is becoming a measurable business risk, frames

it this way:

caregiving is measurable business condition, not a benefits issue. The moment you treat it as a benefits issue, somebody you manage by adding an EAP employee assistance program or a backup care day, you're already isolating it from the workforce planning, from leadership development, from where the real decisions happen. Yeah.

Zack Demopoulos:

Wow. Thank you. Thank you for that. Night, I just want to take a moment for our listeners, readers, and by the way, we're going to put all these links in the show notes. We know many of you are driving or on the treadmill or walking, walking somebody, so.. but I just wanted to shout out to we had Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer for Vayner Media, and she made.. she shared a story where their top performing leader all of a sudden, was was performing poorly, and she has what they call culture champions, and she sent a culture champion out to have coffee with this fella, and he ended up sharing. My mother died, and I'm struggling because I have to put my father in assisted living, and so once I got to the root, to your point, Jerry caught. The phone goes, what can we do to support you? How can we kind of help you turn us around? Yeah. Thank you.

Selma Archer:

Wow, Jerry. In the work Zach and I do, we see so many employers that still view caregiving support as a soft issue in the workplace, based on the data you know that you've come across. What can you point to to help get their attention,

Unknown:

so start with the financial case, because it's concrete. High burnout caregivers include roughly 1000 per member per month in healthcare costs, compared to$600 for lower-risk members, a 60-7% premium tied directly to caregiving related burnout, according to Clio data I reported in the Forbes article. You know, I interviewed Dr. Mojave. That's not a soft issue, that's a claims cost your CFO can model. Then there's the retention mass women who ultimately exit the workforce do the caregiving pressures lose an estimated $350,000 in retirement savings. Alexa's co-founder Jess Ringenberg put it plainly, that's where the squeeze is. And then you zoom out demographically, and the US caregiver population has surged nearly 50% since 2015 Ring and Berg projects that over the next five years, 78 million Americans will be in caregiving roles. This is not a niche population, it's the workforce.

Selma Archer:

Wow,

Zack Demopoulos:

yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love that you shared that stat about 50% increase. We could argue it's the fastest growing segment in the workforce today. How could we be overlooking that? It's the fastest growing, and you, Jerry, made a great point in your article that caregivers are in the prime of their career. So, what risks do you think companies face if they continue to overlook this segment of the workforce. The

Unknown:

most acute risk is leadership pipeline exposure. Mid-career professionals, typically in their 40s and early 50s, are the people companies are grooming for senior roles. They have institutional knowledge, client relationships, and the hard-won judgment that takes years to develop, and they are the most caregiving burdened cohort in the workforce. They have the highest burnout risk. More than half of women in that age group screen positive for depression and anxiety on a standard clinical tool. Women caregivers caregiving 15 hours or more per week are 57% more likely to report severe menopausal symptoms versus non-caregivers. This is the perimenopause window, the peak career window, the sandwich generation window all at once. The conversion is not a coincidence, it's structural reality that companies are almost entirely unprepared for. Liz Powell, founder of CEO of g2 Consulting and Women's Health Advocates, framed the systemic

risk:

these women are the engine room of the paid workforce, when they crash, the fallout is huge. Families fracture, avoidable health claims go up, companies lose talent, communities suffer. That is the cascade. Companies are not pricing into their risk model.

Selma Archer:

Okay. Wow, from all the research and data that you've gathered in pulling together, there's this absolutely fantastic article. Was there anything, or what surprised you in terms of the status of caregiving in the workforce today? Was there anything that jumped out that you were really surprised about?

Unknown:

Yeah, so what shifted in my thinking was the specificity of the data when I first started covering caregiving in the workforce, so I've written more than the few articles I've cited here over the 14 years I've been writing in Forbes. The conversation was largely anecdotal. What really changed is companies like Clio are providing concrete evidence that's not a personal story, like what I told you about my aunt, that's a public health finding with direct workforce implications, but the research I find most personally meaningful is happening on the care infrastructure side, so today Hera, who I talked about earlier, can navigate that process without the $10,000 fee that I paid a lawyer for, an elder care lawyer. Right now, Hera is available in New York State, and rolling out market by market, or state by state. The system existed, it just required somebody tenacious enough to find it. Yeah.

Selma Archer:

Wow, yeah, that's that's great information to share with our audience.

Unknown:

Yeah, and actually, if I can also add to that, and what also gives me great confidence is that the space is maturing, the caliber investors are paying attention, so when I covered Pivotal Ventures, the Melinda French Gates investment arm for Forbes back in November, one finding stood out: investment in caregiving companies is growing 33% annually, more than twice the rate of the broader market. The sector is being taken seriously in ways it simply wasn't a decade ago. What was also validated across all my caregiving coverage is that caregiving remains under counted, because their systems are designed not to see it. It doesn't show up on the claim line, it doesn't surface in the exit interview, and it certainly didn't show up on anyone's dashboard, the data exists. It's just coded wrong, and that keeps the problem invisible for those who could change it.

Selma Archer:

Wow, it's like a what came first, the chicken or the egg? Because it's not measured, it's not seen by employers. Yeah,

Zack Demopoulos:

wow. So our audience, Jerry, is made up of HR, employers, managers, caregivers, and so I believe you've got their attention right now, because they have to speak to CEOs to try to press this issue forward. I think a lot of times employers don't act because they don't even know how to start, or it could be overwhelming, or they may think EAP is the answer, which we know it is not. Right at the end of the day, what would be something that you would recommend or suggest to somebody in our audience that if they were to have a conversation with a CEO? What's one step at least they could start taking today?

Unknown:

Yeah, so for a CEO, I'd say diagnose before you design a solution. Don't assume your current benefits package is solving the problem. Ask your HR team, do we actually know how many of our employees are active caregivers? Do we know where they sit in the organization? Are we tracking whether caregiving-related stress is showing up in our mental health claims, our absenteeism data, our performance reviews. If the answer is no, and for most companies it is, that's where to start. Alexa built a system called Care Conscious to help companies identify and measure caregiving risk in their workforce. Laborg makes a compelling competitive case. Companies that understand the caregiving population at a structured level can actually position themselves as employers of choice. That's a retention and recruitment story, not just a benefit story for caregivers themselves. I want them to understand that their struggles at work are not a failure of personal organization or resilience. The data is unambiguous. This is a systemic gap, not an individual shortcoming. Caregivers bring something to the workforce that is genuinely rare, the ability to manage complexity, and well, you know what I'm saying. Look at me, I'm the

Zack Demopoulos:

one who's saying that was the attorney, she's always correct in my language

Unknown:

and comedic competing demands on just sustained pressure, that's not a liability, that's exactly the skill set leadership requires. Mic

Zack Demopoulos:

drop that, that is not a liability, that actually caregiving is an asset. Thank you so much for pointing that out, Selma, and I say that all the time to our blue face

Selma Archer:

all the time. So, Jerry, if caregiving remains a soft issue in the workplace and remains invisible in the long term, looking, you know, out five years or so down the road, what do you think would be some of the severe consequences for the employees, for the companies, for society at large. I mean, you talked about menopausal women making such a large impact on the workforce, and them dropping out in the prime of their careers and losing like so many hundreds of 1000s of dollars in retirement benefits because of that. What do you see as some of those consequences?

Unknown:

So, if nothing changes, the consequences compound at every level. Individually, caregivers, disproportionately women, continue absorbing financial penalties that follow them into retirement. Women who exit the work. Due to caregiving, lose an estimated$350,000 in retirement savings. They become the next generation of the very crisis they are living through. For companies, you lose the institutional knowledge and leadership depth that takes decades to build, and at the societal level, the unpaid caregiving economy valued at roughly 600 billion annually by the Roosevelt institution continues to be subsidized invisibly by women with no structural recognition to support the demographic pressure. Won't wait for companies to catch up. Over 11,000 Americans turn 65 every day. The caregiver population is projected to reach 78 million by 2035 years from now. I hope the conversation has shifted from should we support givers to how do we optimize how how we support them. I hope caregiving is sitting inside workforce strategy, not inside the benefit catalog. And I hope that when a manager sees a mid-career woman start to disengage, the question isn't what's wrong with her performance, but what's happening in her life, and what do we have to have in place to help? That's the conversation that we should be having.

Zack Demopoulos:

Quotes we can pull from this. Jerry,

Selma Archer:

thank you.

Zack Demopoulos:

Listeners, viewers need to connect with you on LinkedIn. By all means, we'll put your link in there. But how can people find out more about you, and if you could just take a minute, because the work you're doing, especially for businesses founded and run by women, is just you to be commended for it. I believe your company's called Venture Near. So, tell us a little bit about that, and then how can people learn more about you?

Unknown:

Yeah, sure. So, you can go to venturenear.com the e n t u r e n e r.com The company does research to define and eliminate the challenges of underestimated entrepreneurs. We do the Wells Fargo impact of women-owned businesses. I've also done some research on how women, and then, in parentheses, and men invest in startups, research on diversifying New York City's venture capital community. I do training for New York City small business services and oversee their MWBE mentors program, but I'm best known for the articles that I write in Forbes about the success factors of women-owned businesses, and through the last two or three years I've really focused in on women's health, and I'm gearing up to also include a lot more caregiving articles, as well as you could see by the number of articles I was citing throughout this conversation. More recently, I launched a sub stack called Women's Health and Market Visibility, so that Substack really highlights the fact that there's a lot of bias and lack of information about women's health, which is putting women's health at risk for poorer outcomes, and we already live longer and die in poorer health, so this needs to be corrected.

Selma Archer:

Definitely. Wow, thank you so much. Thank you so very much for joining us today, Jerry. We really just enjoy it with such an honor to talk to you and hear all of the great information that you have based on the research.

Unknown:

My pleasure.

Zack Demopoulos:

Without a doubt, without a doubt, if anybody is doubting, is there a business case for doing something about caregiving? We ask that you take 25 minutes of your life and watch this podcast, because your information was just extremely important and valuable. Thank you, Jerry.

Unknown:

Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to catch new episodes of Working Caregivers, the Invisible Employees Podcast, every other Tuesday. Please also visit our website, Invisible Employee advocates.com to subscribe to our newsletter, purchase our book, and learn more about how we can help you strengthen your workplace to become more supportive of working caregivers, do.