CarePath Signal — free workforce mapping
Free Employee Caregiving Survey — Map the Hidden Caregiving Load in Your Workforce
Most HR teams cannot answer a simple question: how many of our people are caring for someone at home right now? CarePath Signal is a short, anonymous survey that answers it — and shows you where the retention risk actually sits.
Request your free workforce caregiving mappingExample survey questions
The survey takes about three minutes. Questions are tailored to your workforce, but a typical instrument looks like this:
- Outside of work, do you provide caregiving to an adult family member or friend — a parent, spouse, sibling, or neighbour?
- Roughly how many hours per week do you spend on that care, including phone calls, appointments, and coordination?
- Do you expect to begin or significantly increase caregiving for an adult in the next two years?
- In the past 12 months, has anyone in your family had a hospitalisation, fall, new diagnosis, or move into assisted living?
- Do you also have children under 18 living at home (dual caregiving, sometimes called the sandwich generation)?
- In a typical month, how many work hours are interrupted by caregiving calls, appointments, or emergencies?
- Has caregiving caused you to decline a project, a promotion, travel, or a shift in the past year?
- Have you considered reducing your hours, moving to part time, or leaving your job because of caregiving?
- Which of the following benefits that we already offer are you aware of? (EAP, backup care, caregiver leave, flexible scheduling, financial counselling)
- Have you used any of those benefits in the past 12 months? If not, what stopped you?
- How comfortable would you feel telling your manager that you are managing a caregiving situation?
- How comfortable would you feel telling HR the same thing?
- What would help most right now: information and referrals, schedule flexibility, financial guidance, or someone to coordinate care on your behalf?
- If we ran one workshop on caregiving this year, what topic would be most useful to you? (open response)
How it works
1. Field it anonymously
A QR code on screen at a town hall, all-hands, or benefits fair gets high in-the-room completion. An email link covers remote and shift-based employees. Responses carry no names, employee IDs, or email addresses.
2. Results go to HR and leadership only
You receive one aggregated report: caregiving prevalence, anticipated caregiving in the next two years, benefits awareness versus utilisation, disclosure comfort, and the workshop topics your employees asked for in their own words. Nothing is published and no manager sees raw team-level answers.
3. No cost, no commitment
The mapping is free and there is no obligation to buy anything afterwards. If the findings warrant a costed business case, the paid Caregiver Workforce Audit is the next step.
What organizations typically discover
The pattern repeats almost every time: prevalence is far higher than leadership expected, and self-reported work impact is far lower than the behavioural answers suggest. A third to a half of respondents disclose active adult caregiving, and a further large group expects to start within two years — yet only a small minority tick the box saying caregiving affects their work.
That gap is not employees being fine. It is employees protecting their standing. The same surveys usually show low comfort with telling a manager or HR, alongside answers that describe declined projects, refused travel, and considered resignations. Benefits awareness tells the same story: programs the company already pays for are unknown or unused, because nobody identifies as the person they are for.
The practical output is a short list of things you can act on immediately — usually one communication fix, one flexibility fix, and one education session — before you spend on anything new.
Frequently asked questions
How is the employee caregiving survey delivered?
Two ways, and most organizations use both. A QR code displayed at a town hall, all-hands, or benefits fair gets high in-the-room completion, and an email link covers remote and shift-based employees. The survey takes about three minutes to complete.
Is the survey anonymous?
Yes. Responses are collected anonymously with no names, employee IDs, or email addresses attached. That anonymity is the point: only about 8% of employees feel comfortable telling HR directly that they are caregiving, so identified surveys systematically undercount the population.
Who sees the results?
A single aggregated results report goes to HR and leadership only. Nothing is published, no individual responses are shared, and no manager sees their own team's raw answers.
Is there any cost or commitment?
No. The workforce caregiving mapping is free and carries no obligation. Organizations that want to convert the findings into a costed business case and retention roadmap can then engage a Caregiver Workforce Audit, which starts at $7,500.
How long does it take to get results?
Fielding typically runs one to two weeks depending on whether you pair it with an event. The results report is delivered within about a week of the survey closing.
Next step after the survey
Once you know the prevalence, the Caregiver Workforce Audit turns it into a costed business case and a prioritized retention roadmap. Caregiver Workforce Audits start at $7,500.
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