Caregiving & Family Care Impact on Employees | Torchlight in SHRM

Torchlight is honored to have been featured by the Society of Human Resource Executives in an article regarding Starbucks’ caregiving and family friendly employee benefits. Starbucks has correctly identified caregiving demands as a concern for employees and a possible threat to the company. “[Caregiving benefits are] giving our [employees] resources for things that happen in regular life,” stated Ron Crawford, Starbucks’ Vice President for Benefits. “We wanted to give them something to help fill in the gaps.”

The article discusses the impact that caregiving demands have on employees and highlights the scope of some current offerings across a surveyed population. Additionally, the article utilizes Torchlight’s client Boston Private to illustrate how employees respond favorably to caregiving benefits and support by employers.

employee caregiving stress

“Given the challenges of launching any new benefit, we weren’t expecting immediate, high utilization, but it wasn’t long before we saw the number of users growing,”wrote Diane Terwilliger, HR Director for Payroll and Benefits at Boston Private. “The feedback over the last three years has been very positive, and we’ve noted that our employees are utilizing the benefit to advocate for their children in extreme situations, as well as simply to help figure out simple solutions for everyday issues. Today, almost 10 percent of our workforce uses the benefit.”

Please read the entire article here or download it as a PDF.