Taking Care and Business

Miguel Pomar was born a caretaker. His parents, Chilean immigrants living in San Jose, California, “just took people in,” he says. Family members, distant relatives, friends—all were welcome. His parents taught him to care for others, especially family. “And I have lived by that,” Pomar says.

From a young age, Pomar helped navigate forms, finances, and medical appointments as his English outpaced that of his parents. He also helped care for his older brother, Luis, who has an intellectual disability.

Luis has resided with or near Pomar and his wife for much of their marriage, along with their two children, the occasional relative, and eventually Pomar’s parents. Over the years, Pomar and his wife have done everything from scheduling Luis’s therapy and managing his medications to teaching him life skills such as preparing food and taking the bus to his job at the BYU laundry.

Pomar has managed caregiving alongside a busy professional life, which has led him from Silicon Valley to BYU Marriott’s Business Career Center, where he is associate director. Pomar acknowledges that the balancing act “is definitely not easy,” but he’s also found that caregiving has cultivated important leadership skills that help him in the workplace. “You have to be a leader when you’re caring for other people and figuring out their needs,” Pomar says.

Like Pomar, an estimated 73 percent of the nation’s workforce are unpaid caregivers.¹ Whether parenting children at home or caring for aging family members, caregivers spend an average of 24 hours per week providing care—a part-time job on top of their paid employment.² This time and energy commitment is one reason that caregiving has often been perceived as an obstacle to worker productivity and career growth. And often it’s more than just a perception—the so-called “motherhood penalty” is alive and well, with women experiencing a 60 percent drop in their earnings compared to men’s in the decade following the birth of their first child.³ There’s no question that unpaid caretaking impacts one’s professional career. The real question is what kind of impact does caregiving have?

In spite of—or perhaps because of—the challenges caretakers face, experts are acknowledging that caretaking yields tangible professional benefits. Both lived experience and research point to the core skills that caregivers bring into the workplace—skills that not only boost their own professional performance but also elevate the culture and efficiency of their organizations.

Crossover Skills

Human resources manager and recent BYU Marriott EMBA alumna Mikilani Yamada still remembers the day she brought her first son home from the hospital: “All of a sudden I had this new human being with me, and he couldn’t understand what I was saying,” she recalls.

The next year with her infant became a master class in nonverbal communication. “I had to learn how to pay attention, read his cues and facial expressions, and understand the way he expressed frustration and anger,” Yamada says. “It pushed me in a new way. That was a major communication lesson that I don’t think I would ever be able to put on a résumé.”

Still, Yamada recognizes how skills forged through parenting have amplified her work performance. She has spent more than a decade in the HR field, including managing HR for BYU Broadcasting, and she now helps lead the team that is transitioning BYU to a new enterprise management software. Whenever a colleague with flaring emotions steps into her office to vent, Yamada keeps her cool. “I have developed a greater empathy, and I’ve learned to be patient,” she says. “Caretaking has helped me value relationships first in tough situations and better understand what someone means beyond the words coming out of their mouth.”

When she was at BYU Broadcasting, Yamada’s entire department took the Crucial Conversations course, which is based on the best-selling book that teaches workplace communication skills to manage conflict and increase productivity. She recalls noting that the principles she and her coworkers learned together match skillsets she’s seen caregivers naturally bring to the job: “Empathy, communication, observation—these soft skills are valuable.”

Her observations as both an employee-caretaker herself and as an HR manager align with research. A recent study by Rutgers Center for Women in Business that was published in Harvard Business Review highlights caregiving skills that cross over to professional work. These skills, notes Lisa S. Kaplowitz, Rutgers Business School professor and lead researcher behind the study, “positively impact culture, retention, and ultimately the bottom line.”⁴

The research team identified three categories of crossover skills: humanity (empathy, teamwork, emotional intelligence, collaboration, loyalty), productivity (efficiency, patience, tenacity, resilience), and cognitivity (prioritizing, flexibility, anticipating needs, multitasking, focus).

Humanity

The most frequent skill reported in the Rutgers study (49.6 percent of respondents) was empathy. Pomar credits the empathy he forged as a caretaker for much of the success he has had as a manager.

“Caregiving opens your heart,” Pomar says. “In the corporate world, the bottom line is very important. But human capital is the most important piece you have. If you don’t know how to lead those people and teach them to believe in themselves, you’ll never reach your desired result.”

While a professional doesn’t need to be a caretaker to add value, Pomar feels that his own caregiving was his most valuable asset in developing the leadership skills that drove his career.

The Rutgers researchers note that skills associated with humanity “simply make one a better coworker.” Managers with this skillset are fair-minded and colleagues are supportive. “This results in increased retention, engagement, and innovation,” writes Kaplowitz.⁵

Erin Holmes is a professor and the director of BYU’s School of Family Life. Her scholarship focuses on parenting and the work-family

interface. Both her research and her own experiences with the physical and practical demands of caretaking, she says, “help me implement family-supportive practices and sensitivity in our workplace.”

That might mean working with the university to offer flexibility and remote work to an employee who needs help supporting family, or it might mean covering classes for a colleague facing a crisis at home. “If I can relieve some of that burden with resources available to me,” says Holmes, “then when they come to work, they’ll be more renewed and ready for their work.”

Productivity

Employees who prioritize time and work with tenacity, writes Kaplowitz, can “make decisions with imperfect information. This improves productivity, which increases the bottom line.”⁶

Caregiving requires grit and patience, which builds tenacity. Take it from Katelyn Fagan, a 2023 MBA alumna and marketing director over brand strategy at Zerorez, a multinational cleaning company. She’s also a family-lifestyle content creator and mother of eight, including two sets of twins.

As a parent, she says, you learn a lot about dealing with tasks you’d rather avoid. “Potty training is one of those,” she notes, “but you stick with it because you know it has to get done.” The day-to-day of caretaking—preparing meals, picking up toys, reminding kids to put their shoes on—taught Fagan the resilience to tackle her least favorite tasks at work, like crafting the perfect email reply, copyediting stacks of brand copy, and ending relationships with vendors.

“That small progress that you see toward your goals really does pay off as a parent—and it pays off in business too,” says Fagan, who founded her business in 2009. “It’s just showing up and doing what needs to get done, even when the results don’t come quickly.”

BYU alumna Angela Ashurst-McGee began a résumé-writing business called Upword Resume while she was at home parenting five young children. She maximized her productivity into slivers of time carved into her day, growing her clientele and writing résumés during nap time and preschool. “I could accomplish as much in a 90-minute preschool session as other people could in a whole day,” Ashurst-McGee says. “I became super efficient.” Upword Resume has grown into full-time work and a thriving business, and Ashurst-McGee now employs many productive writers who are also caregivers.

“I love that I’m able to provide meaningful, flexible, well-paid work for my writers,” she says. “Many of them are smart, skilled women who are balancing career and family.”

Cognitivity

Kaplowitz and her research team coined the term cognitivity in reference to the concept of cognitive labor—the invisible work critical to running a household.⁷ This includes tasks like making sure the bathroom is stocked with toilet paper, prescriptions are filled, appointments are scheduled, and registrations are completed on time. These small things add up to a heavy load.

“As social scientists, we often call something invisible when it’s not usually acknowledged,” says Holmes. “It’s not acknowledged because you’re not getting paid for it or because people aren’t appreciating or recognizing it. It’s not hard for us to see why household work and childcare would be invisible work.”

Invisible labor doesn’t only happen at home. In the workplace, writes Kaplowitz, it manifests as flexibility, anticipating needs, prioritizing tasks, and managing projects. “People with high cognitivity manage disruptions and take initiative to complete tasks with little or no direction.”⁸

Caregiving has taught Pomar the ability to anticipate needs, prioritize, and take initiative. “How I manage myself today comes as a result of focus and intentional development from when I was younger,” he says. Now he and his wife are preparing for the future, anticipating the needs of his brother when his parents won’t be around to help care for him. Pomar says that at home and at work, “preparation is the antidote, the prescription for eliminating pain.”

Caring for the Caregivers

Yamada remembers working for a department that had nursing mothers crossing a parking lot to find a private place in another building to pump milk. When she brought up the concern to leadership, Yamada was told that the distance was within legal requirements at the time. Surely, she thought, they could do better, so she set out to create a “quiet room,” a peaceful spot for all employees to relax, with priority for nursing moms. Given the value caregivers bring to the workplace and the sheer number of employees who have caregiving responsibilities, Yamada sees a strong case for offering support. “We need to provide accommodations for people who need them,” she says.

The quiet room in Yamada’s department is just one example of how these accommodations can elevate the workplace for everyone. And while caregiving responsibilities such as the birth of a child or ongoing care for a disabled family member are often planned, other responsibilities, such as a spouse or a parent suddenly declining in health, can come as a surprise. Support for caregivers when they need it—including paid leave and flexible schedules—benefits everyone.

Holmes points out that the research literature overwhelmingly shows the benefits of leave policies. When it comes to policies specific to supporting parents, Holmes says simply, “We know that parental leave helps children and helps parents.” And yet she notes that the United States has “one of the worst parental leave policies on the globe,” only offering 12 weeks of protected but unpaid leave for caregivers through the Family and Medical Leave Act. The US is the only country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—and one of only six countries in the world—that doesn’t mandate paid parental leave.⁹

Holmes recalls a 2004 study that focused on the increased workload new mothers face. One finding was that new mothers were spending seven times more time taking care of their house and family than before giving birth. For fathers, Holmes adds, the workload quadrupled.¹⁰ Despite that gender disparity, both “moms and dads were doing a tremendous amount more,” and Holmes imagines that if the study were conducted today, results would show fathers taking on even more. “Men have been continuing to increase their desire to be more actively involved fathers.”

The increased workload doesn’t lighten up as babies grow into children. Early in her career, Holmes worked on several studies that explored the challenges of parents. Researchers found that parents hit a breaking point—a place in which they feel uncomfortable conflict between employment and caregiving—when they work about 41 hours per week and have at least one child in the home under the age of five.¹¹ This discovery, replicated across the world, felt particularly poignant to Holmes, who at the time was a mom of three young kids.

Scholars believe this threshold exists, she says, “because the amount of work required to meet the day-to-day demands of our children’s care as well as our own personal care increases when we have small children.” Employers can benefit from recognizing these demands and offering accommodations such as caregiver leave, remote work, and flexible schedules, which have been shown over and over to increase productivity at work.

The study conducted by Holmes and her team suggests that flexibility is one way to mitigate the strain. The research found that women who had high flexibility in when and where they work were only about one-third as likely to report work-life conflict compared to those who had low flexibility. Only 17 percent of workers who had high flexibility and a child five or younger reported conflict, while 55 percent of employees with a young child whose jobs offered low flexibility reported conflict.¹²

In her recent article in the Journal of Creating Value, BYU Marriott professor Kristen DeTienne explores benefits beyond productivity that employers gain by valuing traits like caring.¹³ “Research has shown that organizations attract a wider variety of talent and improve as they challenge their defaults and intentionally incorporate caring and compassion,” she says. It typically costs little, she notes, to allow employees time off to care for a parent recovering from surgery or to work a schedule that benefits their families. And what do organizations get in return? Loyalty, DeTienne says.

Pomar is grateful his senior leadership understands his situation so that when his brother or one of his parents has an unexpected need, Pomar can step out of the office. “That means the world to me,” he says. “When I’m at work, I give 120 percent. In exchange, there’s consideration for the fact that there are moments when I just need to take care of something for my special-needs brother.” In addition, colleagues often step in to take something off Pomar’s plate. “That builds camaraderie. I naturally want to reciprocate when they need help.”

In a study on work-life balance, Holmes remembers interviewing a father who went into work at 4 a.m., which got him back to his family by 3 p.m. “People who feel like they can modify their start time or their end time or their meal break feel better about their work-family balance,” Holmes says. “It turns out, the more autonomy we give each other, the better we’re able to do our work.”

Leveraging Value

In her résumé-writing business, Ashurst-McGee often works with clients looking to reenter the workplace after taking a break for unpaid caregiving. The biggest mistake she sees them make? Giving into imposter syndrome—“feeling that they don’t have skills and then not writing the résumé.” Another mistake: assuming they don’t have experiences to fill their employment gap.

“I’ve never spoken with someone who’s been a caretaker or who has stepped out of the workforce who does not have any content for their résumé,” she says. Returning workers need to get a little creative to fill the gaps. “Almost everyone who is in some caretaking role is also doing other things,” Ashurst-McGee says. “They’re helping with the books for their partner’s business. They’re helping friends with their taxes on the side. They’re volunteering at the school. They’re leading a church or a community organization.”

Unpaid caregiving itself, Ashurst-McGee says, doesn’t often have a place directly on a résumé. Still, “caregiving work is important work, and it’s highly skilled work,” she points out. “I think as a culture we are starting to key into that more, to realize the value of caretaking work.”

This value is obvious to Pomar, who points out that caretaking happens inside the workplace as well. “If I am a manager of a department, I’m a caretaker,” he says.

Fagan sees the fruits of her caretaking experience in her daily work habits. “It’s about how I show up every day. I don’t need to be micromanaged. I ask for feedback, I’m responsible, I hit deadlines, I overcommunicate, and I own up to mistakes.” She learned all this, she says, from running her own business and from being a caretaker.

“Employers are looking for emotional intelligence,” Fagan says. “They can teach you hard skills, but they can’t teach you how to be compassionate or manage your time. Caregivers have been forced through the refiner’s fire to learn how to be a better human. Those are valuable skills. Don’t count yourself out.”

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Minding the Caregiving Gap

How do you fill a caregiving-related gap on a résumé? Angela Ashurst-McGee, founder of Upword Resume, coaches jobseekers—from C-suite level executives to stay-at-home moms reentering the workforce after 25 years. Here are her top tips for minding the caregiving gap.

• In most cases, don’t put caregiving directly on your résumé, and steer clear of cutesy titles like “CEO of Smith Family.”

• Rethink the “professional experience” section. A workforce reentry résumé can be more inclusive, covering part-time, contract, and volunteer work. There’s no need to specify paid or unpaid, full- or part-time. “Experience is experience,” Ashurst-McGee says.

• Mark your career gap with recent experiences. Brainstorm and cast your net wide: school volunteering, church callings, community volunteering, teaching classes, creating newsletters, helping friends with taxes, homeschooling. These things and more all fit the bill. Your college job 12 years ago will be less impressive than more recent activities.

• Show your skills. “Anyone can write ‘great communication skills,’ but you need to give evidence,” Ashurst-McGee says. For example, a president of a children’s group at church might include bullet points such as “oversaw X number of teachers” or “created activities for X number of children.” These facts tell the story of multitasking, leadership, and coordination. Include a mix of hard and soft skills, at a proportion of 70/30 or 60/40.

• Look forward. If you’re a full-time caregiver planning a career reentry, build skills by volunteering and taking free LinkedIn courses. “It doesn’t need to be a 40-hour-a-week thing, especially when you’re already so busy,” Ashurst-McGee says. Making a little time to gain or refresh skills helps in the long run.

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Written by Sara Atwood
Illustrations by Jon Krause

About the Author
Sara Atwood is an associate editor of Y Magazine. She lives in Orem with her family.

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Notes

1. See Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman, The Caring Company (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School), updated January 17, 2019, 2, hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/The_Caring_Company.pdf.
2. See Fuller and Raman, The Caring Company, 9. See also National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and American Association of Retired Persons, 2020 Report: Caregiving in the U.S., May 2020, 6, aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2020/05/full-report-caregiving-in-the-united-states.doi.10.26419-2Fppi.00103.001.pdf.
3. See PricewaterhouseCoopers, Women in Work 2023, March 2023,2,pwc.com/jg/en/publications/women-in-work-channel-islands-2023.pdf.
4. Lisa S. Kaplowitz and Kate Mangino, “Research: Caregiver Employees Bring Unique Value to Companies,” Balancing Work and Family, Harvard Business Review, August 10, 2023, hbr.org/2023/08/research-caregiver-employees-bring-unique-value-to-companies.
5. Kaplowitz and Mangino, “Caregiver Employees.”
6. Kaplowitz and Mangino, “Caregiver Employees.”
7. See Kaplowitz and Mangino, “Caregiver Employees.”
8. Kaplowitz and Mangino, “Caregiver Employees.”
9. See “Paid Family Leave Across OECD Countries,” The Brief, Bipartisan Policy Center, updated September 2022, bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/paid-family-leave-across-oecd-countries.
10. See Ted L. Huston and Erin Kramer Holmes, “Becoming Parents,” in Handbook of Family Communication, ed. Anita L. Vangelisti (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 113.
11. See E. Jeffrey Hill, Jenet Jacob Erickson, Erin K. Holmes, and Maria Ferris, “Workplace Flexibility, Work Hours, and Work-Life Conflict: Finding an Extra Day or Two,” Journal of Family Psychology 24, no. 3 (June 2010): 354–55.
12. See Hill, Erickson, Holmes, and Ferris, “Workplace Flexibility.”
13. See Kristen Bell DeTienne, Alice Alessandri, and Whitney Evans, “Creating Value Through Leveraging Gender Norms,” Journal of Creating Value, published online May 3, 2024, doi.org/10.1177/23949643241247429.