You already know how important it is to support caregivers on your team.
The challenge? Caregiving challenges and the direct impact on your business don’t show up as clear, trackable data points.
Building a business case for caregiving benefits means associating your investments with positive changes in productivity, retention, leave patterns, and more.
In our recent webinar, From Promise to Proof: Demonstrating ROI in Employee Wellbeing, we shared three ways HR teams can measure the impact of their wellbeing benefits.
Measure the impact on business performance
What it is
To measure ROI through improved business performance, you should evaluate how caregiving benefits impact workforce stability and how employees show up at work. When benefits are working, you’ll start to see it: people stay longer, productivity improves, and there are fewer last-minute leave disruptions.
How to measure
First, define your pain point. Do you have a turnover problem with working caregivers? Do you notice productivity changes across the workforce? Or are you concerned with the volume of leave claims over time? All of these problems are typically influenced by multiple factors, but you’ll focus on trends across key areas to get a clearer picture of impact.
Turnover
- Measure your overall turnover rate by dividing the number of separations by your average employee count over a set period.
- Compare turnover rates between employees who used their caregiving benefits vs. those who didn’t, then track how those trends increase or decrease over time.
- Review your exit survey feedback to see how many employees list caregiving as a reason for leaving.
Productivity
- Not every organization has a clear way to measure productivity. In those cases, look at proxy metrics like absences, engagement scores, and manager-reported performance trends.
- Pro Tip: Compare these metrics between employees who use the benefit vs. those who don’t to understand where support is making the biggest difference.
- Use pulse surveys to capture self-reported productivity (e.g., “How productive were you in Q1 on a scale from 1-10?”) and understand how caregiving impacts day-to-day work.
- Pro Tip: Ask the same questions consistently over time (e.g., monthly or quarterly) so you can track trends before and after introducing caregiving support.
Leave
- Look at how many employees are taking leave, the type of leave they take, how long they’re out, and how quickly they return to work.
- Pro Tip: After introducing caregiving support, look at changes in average leave duration and return-to-work trends to see how support is shaping patterns.
- Pay close attention to unplanned or last-minute PTO or leave related to caregiving needs. A decrease can signal that employees are better supported and able to plan care more proactively.
- Gather feedback from employees returning from leave to understand how supported they felt navigating caregiving needs. Their responses can highlight where benefits are working and where gaps remain.
Measure the impact on clinical outcomes
What it is
Clinical ROI looks at how caregiver support benefits like Cariloop impact healthcare usage and overall costs. We care about this because so often working caregivers sacrifice their own self-care while caring for loved ones. In the long run, this becomes a compounding problem.
With the right support, employees’ health issues are caught earlier, and care is better coordinated, so employees can address health needs before they escalate. To do this correctly, it takes coordination with your caregiving vendor, health plan, and HRIS to review healthcare claim trends for employees who do and do not use their caregiving benefits.
How to measure
Look at your baseline, then watch how patterns shift after introducing caregiving support, especially in clinical outcomes and medical utilization rates.
- Track high-cost care metrics like ER visits, hospital admissions, and readmissions to see whether employees are relying less on crisis-driven care.
- Pro Tip: Compare utilization rates before and after implementation and between employees who use the benefit vs. those who don’t to see if claims are decreasing.
- Look for shifts in how care is accessed, like fewer ER visits, higher use of primary care and preventive services, and more in-network care. It’s a good sign that employees are getting more proactive care instead of reacting to issues as they arise.
- Pro Tip: Partner with your health plan provider to identify changes in site-of-care patterns over time.
- Keep an eye on changes in things like stress, anxiety, and caregiver strain, and see how those trends line up with leave and absenteeism.
- Pro Tip: Pair clinical or vendor data with employee survey feedback to see how those changes are impacting day-to-day work, from attendance to overall performance.
Measure dollar-for-dollar savings across programs
What it is
This type of ROI focuses on clear, immediate financial impact; the “hard dollars” you take to your CFO to show what you’re spending and what you’re saving.
You’ll often see this most clearly when switching or optimizing caregiving vendors, especially if your current solution is expensive or unpredictable.
Cariloop partners with a leading advisory, tax and assurance firm that cut their backup care costs by 50% in under six months after switching to Cariloop’s Backup Care program from another provider. This unlocked budget for them to invest in more comprehensive caregiving benefits that can support the needs of even more employees.
How to measure
Add up your total caregiving spend each month, including backup care, navigation tools, coaching resources, and internal admin time. Compare it to what you were spending before switching to a provider like Cariloop.
- Start by comparing your total program spend before and after introducing or switching caregiving providers, and watch how those costs trend month over month. This helps you determine whether spend is driven by the care you’re actually paying for or by other costs, like platform or administrative fees.
- Look for opportunities to save further by consolidating niche vendors and use those savings to offset healthcare costs or reinvest in other benefit areas.
Caregiving is never a straightforward problem…and neither is measuring the ROI of your caregiving benefits.
The right caregiving partner can help you set clear goals upfront, identify the metrics that matter, and gather the data needed to tell a clear story to leadership.
At Cariloop, we work alongside you to make sense of the data so you can clearly show the impact caregiving support is having on your team based on the strategic priorities you define.
For a deeper dive, check out The ROI Playbook for Caregiving Benefits: Three Steps to Prove Impact or this webinar to get more tips on establishing your business case for caregiving benefits and proving the impact of your investments.