Proving the ROI of your caregiving benefits isn’t easy.
Measurement is just the starting point. To show value, benefit leaders need to connect how employees are using support, like finding last-minute care or guidance from a care coach, to changes in absences, productivity, and leave patterns.
As healthcare costs rise and budgets tighten, benefit leaders are looking beyond basic utilization metrics to understand whether a benefit is improving performance, reducing risk, and driving measurable financial impact.
This post breaks down key takeaways from our From Promise to Proof webinar, where leaders from Cariloop and Spring Health shared a simple three-step approach to turning wellbeing benefit utilization data into a clear ROI story.
Step 1: Define the problem
Before you jump into any numbers, take a step back and define what pain point you’re trying to solve. Are employees missing work often? Are turnover rates increasing?
Don’t tackle every problem at once. Instead, focus on the most pressing workforce issue that’s driving you to invest in caregiving, whether it’s caregiver burnout, unplanned absences, or retention of working caregivers.
Key players
Proving the ROI of your benefit investments starts with collecting qualitative and quantitative data points from different teams.
- HR & benefit leaders: Review your workforce data through engagement surveys, exit surveys, and leave claims to see where caregiving challenges are showing up across your organization. Look for patterns in leave, shifts in benefit usage, or trends within specific teams, roles, or departments.
- People managers: Talk to your team leaders about what they’re noticing day-to-day, like call-outs, last-minute PTO, or dips in focus. This is where you’ll get a clearer picture of what employees are actually dealing with beyond what the data shows.
Timing
Define your priority pain points before launching or expanding your caregiving benefits.
Step 2: Establish your baseline and start measuring
Now that you’ve identified the problem through data and qualitative feedback, the next step is establishing your baseline to compare with after your caregiving benefits are implemented. This is where you start connecting what you’re seeing and hearing to signals you can track over time and link to business performance.
Key players
- Analytics: Work with your analytics team or whoever owns reporting to consolidate the data needed to demonstrate an improvement to your challenge over time. Likely, they’ll combine employee demographics from your HRIS with engagement survey results, and leave/PTO data to start.
- Caregiving vendors: When implementing your caregiving benefits, establish a baseline for enrollment and utilization. This will help you anticipate a sample size of users that you can review over time.
When to do it
Establish your baseline data before employees have access to their new caregiving benefits. Update your data sources every 3-6 months to monitor changes in employee behavior over time.
Step 3: Demonstrate your ROI
This is where you connect the improvements you’re seeing across your workforce to your investment in caregiving benefits to demonstrate improvements in the problem you identified before.
After 12 – 24 months of data collection, you’ll start to see some trends. It’s important to remember that the pain points most employers identify before investing in caregiving benefits aren’t linear problems. They’re influenced by multiple factors, including caregiving.
With the right caregiving benefits, at the end of this exercise, you should see directional improvement in productivity, working caregiver retention, and reduced unplanned leave claims.
For inspiration on three different approaches to measuring the ROI of your caregiving benefits, check out Three Ways to Measure the ROI of Family Caregiving Benefits.