Five key areas to consider

When capturing data and measuring the impact of the support you have in place at your organisation for carers, there are five key areas to consider: Measuring, Monitoring, Evaluating, Reporting and Taking action.

1. Measuring

Firstly, it is important to define the scope of the work you will be undertaking, including the purpose of the data collection, your goal(s) and desired outcome(s). For example, your organisation’s purpose for data collection may be to find out how many people in your workplace are carers and your goal may be to successfully disseminate an employee survey that includes a question about caring. Your desired outcome may be that 70% or more of employees complete the survey and you are able to report on a number of carers who require support in your workplace.

Measuring data can be looked at both in terms of identifying and quantifying business benefits for the organisation as a whole and capturing the impact on individuals (including quantitative and qualitative evidence – ie increased numbers of carers reached and supported). Data could be gathered in several ways, including via any of the following if relevant:

• Including a question(s) about caring in annual/regular staff survey, for example alongside questions on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) characteristics like disability or age.
• Including caring in staff satisfaction or staff health and wellbeing survey(s) and/or measures of work-life balance.
• Providing a system/process for carer self-identification. Ideally, in order to target support to carers effectively, it is helpful to have a definitive method for them to self-identify. Depending on the size and structure of your organisation, this could be via a simple declaration using MS Forms if you do not have a self-service HR system in place. While information gathered via anonymous surveys will provide some useful insights, without ‘hard’ data that can be tracked to named individuals, it will be more difficult to assess and review what this data is saying.
• A carers passport can be a ‘go to’ tool here. Whatever the size or shape of your organisation, this can be a practical way of enabling a ‘caring conversation’ between an employee and their line manager, and capturing and recording each carer’s support needs.
• Uptake/feedback on carers passports (depending on how your organisation chooses to record this data).
• Manager feedback (what trends they are seeing, types of support in place and identifying and addressing training/awareness gaps).
• Uptake/feedback on carers leave.
• Uptake/feedback from carers network (and other inclusion groups such as disability or gender based groups).
• Feedback forms from events.
• Health and wellbeing scheme/Employee Assistance Programme.
• Employee portal(s).
• (Unplanned) staff absence.
• Exit interview questionnaires.
• As caring is more prevalent among the 45 plus age group – and women, particularly as sandwich carers, looking at workforce composition in terms of age and gender.

This is of course not an exhaustive list and some data gathering methods may fit your organisation’s culture, size and structure better than others.  

Once you have decided the data you wish to capture, identify who in the organisation will take on the role of monitoring and evaluating this and who are the influential people in your workplace to make the necessary changes happen.  Depending on your organisation, this may be one person or more, and may cover HR, diversity and inclusion or the carers network (if you have one).

Tip: When starting to gather data it is also helpful to think about this from the perspective of carers in your organisation. Sometimes individuals may be concerned if their employer has started to ask for this type of information if it has not been sought before. However, communicating clearly why this information is being asked for, and how it is going to be held, should help to make employees feel more confident about responding. Following GDPR best principles should also help assure carers that information provided will be used appropriately and sensitively, ie:

• Only gather data that you are going to act on
• Be really specific about its use
• Make sure it is timely – only keep it for as long as it is required
• Keep it secure, with extra security in place to protect sensitive personal data

2. Monitoring

It is important firstly to decide how long you are going to monitor your carer support for. Will it be for a short period of time, like a month for a survey to be answered, or over a longer amount of time such as a year for monitoring take up of carers leave or a carer passport?

You may also wish to monitor carer support over a certain time when you have been specifically promoting a particular type of support. You can then observe whether take up of this support has increased and what promotional campaigns have been effective. In this case it is important to ensure there is a benchmark at the start of any promotion of support so that the results can be compared before and after. Having a carers passport scheme in place can be helpful here, as this can be an ongoing way of monitoring the take up of carer support in your workplace.  

Over time (following the implementation of carer support) your organisation may find it helpful to have evidence of:

• reduced (unplanned) staff absence
• take up of carers leave or use of carers passports (if in place)
• reduced early exit from the workplace/increased staff retention
• increased staff engagement (eg through feedback to staff surveys, increased involvement in workplace networks or social activities etc. This could be both through carer specific networks/activities etc and also from/with networks covering other areas such as gender, disability etc)
• possibly increased recruitment of females (where relevant)

Your organisation may like to pilot a type of carer support and monitor the progress before incorporating that support fully into the workplace.

3. Evaluating

The first step here is to decide what the evaluation should measure and what metrics should be used. What are the key questions that the organisation wants answered from the evaluation – are they objective or subjective? For example, do you wish to evaluate quantitative data such as changes in numbers of carers in your workforce overall (or carers taking up a particular form of support such as carers leave or a carers passport)? And/or are you looking to assess qualitative data such as feedback from carers on the effectiveness of support provided?

It can also be helpful for future reference to reflect on the practice of your data collection – anything that could have gone better, anything to change for the next time, anything that was missed? Were there any outside factors that could have impacted the results?

4. Reporting

The next stage is to ensure that there is a record of the work your organisation has been doing to measure and evaluate carer support.  Key points to consider here are:

• What are the key points to record? For example, these might include the purpose of your activities to measure and evaluate carer support, key findings (whether quantitative and/or qualitative), any observations or learning from these and any proposed follow up actions. (If your organisation is looking to take the Carer Confident benchmark, these points are also important for the benchmarking process, ie being able to demonstrate what positive steps you have made to understand, evaluate and take action on your support provided to carers).
• Who will this report be communicated to in your organisation? Will it be primarily for HR/line managers and leadership teams, or will it also be made available to the carers network (if there is one)? And will any headline findings be communicated to employees more widely within your workplace?

5. Taking action

The final step is to decide whether there are any necessary changes to be made to policies or practices – and, if so, what is the process for actioning these to make sure there is development?

For example, this action might include any, or all, of the following:

• Building your business case for implementing/extending support to carers.
• Piloting a new or extended type of carer support that has been identified as a support need (eg paid leave for caring which is increasingly being recognised as a priority for workplace support).
• Awareness raising or training to managers or other employees on caring/carers.
• Supporting staff/carer wellbeing through improved work/life balance or flexibility.
• Proactively promoting carer support in an area of the organisation where it has been identified as less prevalent or effective.
• Involving carers more directly in the development of the carer support you are offering and identifying a practical way(s) in which you will do this (eg through a carers network if you have one or through a specific communication such as a follow up carer survey or focus group).
• Involving carers in the ongoing evaluation of the workplace support you provide.

Following up on key findings from your measurement and evaluation of carer support is important not only to inform your future work in this area but also to communicate to employees that you have been asking them for information for a purpose. It demonstrates that you have not just been collecting information for the sake of it (as a ‘tick box’ exercise) but that you are taking some practical action as a result. It will also help explain why the information was sought (and make it more likely that employees will be happy to provide it again in the future) and communicate the message that you place a high priority on carer support.