The purpose of the Employed Caregiver Survey is to help employers understand the effects of caregiving on their workforce, become aware of community resources needed by their employed caregivers, and identify ways to support caregivers. The HR manager and/or senior management team/s should be involved in the decision to implement the survey in their workplace, and if you live in Wisconsin, we strongly encourage you to implement this survey in consultation with your Extension educator. There is no cost for implementing the survey for Division of Extension employees.
Before the survey
Register/Schedule initial phone consult: The HR manager and/or senior management team/s should be involved in the decision to implement the survey in their workplace. If your workplace has questions or wants to host the survey, please complete the registration form. We will respond within ten business days to set up a brief phone consult.
Site Coordinator: One your workplace has decided to conduct the survey, you will need to identify a point of contact for your workforce. This person will be responsible for coordinating internal communications in their workforce before, during, and after the survey, as well as communicating with the project staff at UW—Madison. The site coordinator will also be responsible for sending the survey invitation and completion reminders to their workforce, so should have the ability to send messages to all employees. The site coordinator will also receive the final report about 30 days after the close of the survey and is expected to share it with senior management and employees.
Online access: The survey is distributed online, and should be done on work time at a work device. The site coordinator should strategize about how all employees will access and complete the survey in privacy if they choose to do so. The survey is also mobile-friendly.
Share information about the survey and its benefit: Roughly one week before the survey is made available to employees, the site coordinator should share information about the survey with employees, which might include sharing information about how long the survey will take to complete (no more than 10 minutes), distributing the the informational brochure, and the commitment of the employer to respond to the needs of caregivers. Some site coordinators work with senior leadership to send out an introductory email; others like to present the information in person at staff meetings.
Timeline: We will work with you to establish an implementation calendar to create the date the survey will be made available to employees. Keeping the survey open for four to six weeks is likely to result in the highest response rate. During the phone consultation, we will work with you to clarify a survey distribution date, dates for follow up email messages, the close date, and when the final results/report will be provided. After those dates are established, we will provide you with a unique link to the survey for distribution and send you completion rates just prior to your scheduled reminders. Sample text for email reminders is available here.
Distributing the survey
Distribution: The survey is online. It is distributed via an anonymous link over email to employees by the site coordinator. A unique link will be provided to the site coordinator after the phone consult.
Email reminders: We recommend sending a reminder every 7 to 10 days the survey is open, and have sample text you can use for these reminders here.
After the survey
Summary report: The site coordinator will receive a summary report about 30 days after the survey is complete. The report will contain a summary page, responses to survey questions, and a file of charts and graphs for use. The report will not contain personally identifiable data or other raw data sets. The report should be shared with the entire workforce.
Responding to the survey data: The purpose of the Employee Caregiver survey is to assist employers in understanding the needs of their workforce and better responding to them. Consider consulting with a local ADRC, Extension partner, statewide taskforce on caregiving, and/or National Alliance for Caregiving.
