Karsten Vagner came to Reimagining Company Culture with a perspective on caregiving that is now mainstream but used to be radical. Working parents and family caregivers are not a niche population to design exceptions for. They are a majority of the workforce, and the companies that design around their reality outperform the ones that do not. As VP of People at Maven, the largest virtual clinic for women's and family health, Karsten works at the intersection of HR practice and caregiver health every day. Before Maven, he led the People team at Zocdoc as the company scaled from 3 to 500 employees, and was Director of People Operations at Bluecore. The throughline in his career is that he has built people functions in companies that took caregiver support seriously well before it was on most CHRO agendas.
His framing in the conversation was practical. Companies do not need to perfect every benefit. They need to make caregiving visible inside their operating model and give caregivers the flexibility, paid leave, and managerial support that the lifecycle actually requires.
How Many Caregivers Are Actually in Your Workforce
The numbers surprise leaders who have not run them recently. AARP's U.S. Workforce report on family caregivers finds that nearly 70 percent of family caregivers report difficulty balancing career and caregiving responsibilities. Roughly one in six employees is also a family caregiver, and 61 percent of family caregivers are working while juggling caregiving duties. Harvard Business Review research on supporting working caregivers notes that 32 percent have taken leaves of absence, 27 percent have shifted to part-time or reduced hours, and 16 percent have turned down promotions because of caregiving demands.
The cost of doing nothing is concrete. Companies absorb the financial and operational consequences whether they support caregivers or not. The choice is between visible support that retains talent and invisible cost that bleeds it.
What Real Support Looks Like
How do you design caregiving benefits that actually get used?
Karsten emphasized that benefit design and benefit utilization are different problems. A generous parental leave policy that managers quietly discourage is worse than a smaller policy that everyone uses without judgment. The companies that get utilization right pair benefit design with manager training, executive modeling, and explicit permission to use the benefit fully. AARP data shows that 84 percent of caregivers who have access to flexible work schedules find them very helpful, and 79 percent of those who used paid caregiving leave rated it very helpful. Utilization is the metric that matters.
What about caregivers who are not parents of young children?
Most caregiver conversation focuses on new parents. The faster-growing population is adult caregivers, often supporting aging parents, partners with chronic illness, or family members with disabilities. Their needs are different. They tend to need flexibility, paid leave, and emotional support over long stretches rather than a concentrated postpartum window. Companies that design only for new parents miss the larger and growing piece of the caregiver population.
What Actually Works for Caregiver Support
Principle 1: Make flexibility a default, not a negotiation
The single most useful policy in most companies is flexible scheduling that does not require employees to disclose why they need it. Caregivers consistently rank schedule flexibility as the most valuable benefit, partly because it adapts to the unpredictable rhythms of family health. FMLA protections matter, but day-to-day flexibility is often the difference between staying and leaving.
Principle 2: Train managers on caregiver conversations
Most managers have not been taught how to handle caregiving disclosures, return-to-work planning, or workload conversations during caregiving demands. Without training, well-meaning managers default to either undue caution or unhelpful enthusiasm. Karsten invests in giving managers a clear playbook for how to support caregivers without overstepping, and how to handle workload changes without penalizing the employee.
Principle 3: Treat maternity leave and other family leaves as full transitions, not pauses
Real support is not just the leave itself. It is the return-to-work plan, the ramp-up of responsibilities, the reintegration into team rhythm, and the honest performance conversations that come later. Companies that do this well end up with returning employees who feel valued. Companies that treat leave as a black box lose people they had every reason to keep.
Where People Operations Fits
Caregiver support sits at the intersection of human resources and employee engagement. Companies that get this right invest in tooling that makes the support tangible. AllVoices supports HR teams with HR case management and AI Co-Pilot capabilities that help track accommodations, leave, and return-to-work conversations consistently, so caregivers do not have to repeat their stories every time their team changes.
How HR uses caregiver data to improve over time
The mature pattern is to track utilization, return-to-work success, and caregiver-specific engagement signals as part of regular operating reviews. Looking at sick leave usage, FMLA patterns, and pulse data on workload sustainability gives HR a clearer picture of where caregivers are struggling and which managers are succeeding at supporting them. The patterns inform program design and manager development.
Frequently Asked Questions About Supporting Parents and Caretakers
What is the most underutilized caregiver benefit?
Backup and emergency care services. Many companies pay for them and few employees use them, often because they do not know they exist or feel uncomfortable accessing them. Communicating the benefit consistently, with manager endorsement, dramatically increases utilization.
Should companies extend paid leave to non-parental caregivers?
Yes. Adult caregiver populations are growing faster than new-parent populations, and the cost of doing nothing shows up as turnover and lost productivity. Companies that extend paid family caregiver leave to a broader set of family situations report stronger retention and higher engagement among caregivers.
How do you avoid creating resentment from non-caregivers?
Frame caregiver support as part of broader life-stage flexibility that everyone benefits from at some point. People who are not currently caregivers are often future caregivers. Designing the workplace to support full lives, not just narrow demographics, lowers resentment and broadens utilization.
What signals indicate your caregiver support is failing?
Higher voluntary turnover among returning parents than among non-parents. Lower promotion rates for caregivers in the year after a family leave. Disproportionate use of bereavement leave followed by exits. Each of those is a flashing yellow light that the support is not landing.
How do small companies compete with large-company benefit packages?
Flexibility, manager behavior, and culture often beat raw dollar value. Smaller companies can win on the day-to-day experience even when they cannot match Fortune 100 leave durations. The lived experience of being a caregiver in a supportive small team is different from being one in a generous but rigid large team.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Karsten's career arc points to a simple truth that is taking too long to spread. Caregiver support is workforce strategy, not a benefits afterthought. The companies that design for caregivers retain more talent, lose less productivity, and build cultures that attract people in stages of life when many companies stop being competitive. The work is concrete: better leave policies, real flexibility, trained managers, and tooling that makes accommodation a normal operating practice rather than a one-off favor.
Caregiver support also signals something larger about how an organization treats its people. The companies that get it right tend to get other things right too. The companies that get it wrong tend to lose more than just caregivers, because the rest of the workforce is watching how the company treats the people who need flexibility the most.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams support caregivers consistently and at scale.
.png)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)