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Work-life balance has never been easier, and the rapid increase of the remote office has been celebrated as a huge victory.
Gone are the days of grueling commutes, flexible working schedules, and the comfort of your own home. But, for a rapidly expanding, often overlooked population, the home office serves as a specialized healthcare facility.
Millions of professionals are currently dealing with all the complexities that come with being remote caregivers to aging parents/relatives. While this separation in working from home gives the proximity necessary to keep aging loved ones out of assisted living facilities, the challenge of writing a quarterly report while working off someone else’s medication schedule is a recipe for acute burnout.
In this article, we’ll go over five strategies to help you manage your workload and not lose your mind.
Firm Boundaries. Flexible Schedule.
When your workplace and your caregiving space are within the same building, the lines between ’employee’ and ‘caregiver’ dissolve instantly. The best way to make up for this is with asynchronous work wherever your employer lets you.
Rather than try to impose a 9-to-5 schedule on your person in the ordinary way, create a routine that matches your loved one’s natural rhythms.
If your older parent has the habit of taking a quiet nap in the morning, use that window for deep, focused work that demands your attention. Cast your calendar aside for ‘care times’ (e.g., lunch, giving a prescription to take medication, physical therapy exercises, etc,) and think about those periods as ‘non-negotiable meetings’.
Communicate the hours of your work that you will operate on with your team so that they know exactly when you’re available.
This can relieve a lot of that pressure from needing to respond to Slack messages while helping your relative.
Technology and Medical Vigilance
If your mind is engaged only in a spreadsheet or a Zoom presentation, it’s excruciatingly easy to lose track of subtle changes in your loved one’s physical condition. So many remote caregivers have to rely on technology to serve as a second pair of eyes and ears.
Think about doing small ‘helper’ upgrades. You could add fitting motion sensors or two-way audio monitors – these help a lot. If you want to take this to the next level then something like a wearable medical alert that will alert your smartphone if your relative has fallen or wandered is also a great way to make your job not only easier, but also more effective (a solid win-win).
Medical vigilance is important, other than hardware. You need to learn the more subtle signs of common, fast-moving diseases in older adults so that you aren’t caught off guard on a hectic workday.
Here’s a quick example of this:
Training on sepsis symptoms from UTIs in elderly patients for early detection is vital. When people get older, a simple (uncomplicated) infection around the urinary tract – which otherwise wouldn’t be a massive problem – may not even display any standard symptoms. For instance, the infected resident might show symptoms of confusion or even lethargy, without any specific (or new) pain or discomfort.
So if the nursing staff member is distracted in some shape or form, they just might think the infected resident is simply taking a longer nap, even though they were supposed to take this as a (possible) sign and intervene.
But it’s not just urinary tract infections that can be deceptive. It can even be bedsores, malnutrition, or even something as simple as dehydration.
The more the nursing home staff is knowledgeable AND focused, the better they can help the residents out and not just help them in a physical health kind of sense, but also avoid potential lawsuits coming the facility’s way.
A Separate and Segmented Work-and-Care Ecosystem
The real conditions of your home will heavily affect your dual-role success.
Situate your work station away from where your loved one spends most of their time. The constant sight of your workstation can really give you the impression that you never leave your office, and the ever-growing visual reminder of your loved one can take away your ability to focus on work.
What you should instead do is build a segmented ecosystem.
Create a specific workspace that’s close enough to enable you to hear a call for help, but visually separated by a door, a screen, or an L-shaped hallway. If visual supervision is a must, put out quality noise-canceling headphones for yourself and set up an ‘entertainment station’ for your sibling or relative.
Communicate Straightforwardly With Your Employer
Trying to hide your caregiving responsibilities from your employer will only heighten your stress. Get candid with your manager about where you are.
You don’t have to go overboard with medical info, but presenting your reality as a logistics challenge is very businesslike. Tell them you’re a primary caregiver and how that will (occasionally) make for background noise on calls or your availability near where you’re most likely to hear about it.
With that being said, most modern, remote-friendly companies are retention-focused and are flexible.
By making eldercare acceptable in the remote workplace, you establish realistic expectations and alleviate the burdensome necessity to ‘cover up’ your day-to-day reality.
The No.1 Priorities – Respite and Time
The ultimate trap for a remote worker is using your designated ‘time off’ from work to do more caregiving, and your ‘time off’ from caregiving to catch up on work. This results in an endless cycle of working and the inevitable psychological and physical exhaustion that goes along with this.
What you really must do is set up respite care.
And that could mean several things. It could mean hiring an in-home health aide for a few hours a week. It could mean signing up your loved one for an adult day program. But it could also go in the direction of rotating shifts with a sibling.
Whichever the case, what you need is time when you are neither an employee nor a caregiver.
A comparison example:
When you go for a lunch break from your remote job, attempt to leave completely.
And even a 15-minute walk around the block is a must-have mental palate cleanser that enables you both to arrive at your laptop and your beloved with fresh resolve.
Conclusion
To be a remote caregiver is an act of great love, but it is without a doubt a second full-time job. You can establish the sustainability of the cycle by establishing boundaries, using intelligent monitoring, setting up your environment, communicating with the employer, and protecting your overtime aggressively.
Balance is not something you can think or dream about, but healthy integration is totally achievable.
