Excerpted from New York Employment Law Letter, written by attorneys at the law firm Epstein Becker & Green, P.C.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed the unique issues cropping up in the workplace because of the "sandwich generation" - people in the prime of their working lives who are "sandwiched" between caring for young children and elderly parents.

What can be done to help employees who find themselves stretched too thin? Employers feel the effects, too, in terms of lost productivity, absenteeism, worker turnover, and training costs. This week's discussion gives concrete ideas for helping workers balance work and family, including child-care initiatives and elder-care initiatives.

Child-care initiatives

While elaborate on-site facilities may not make sense for your business, no- or low-cost alternatives exist. Those alternatives might include providing workers with information about local day care, emergency care, and after-school programs or simply inviting local providers in for a lunchtime seminar. Information about child-care options could also be posted on your intranet.

Other relatively low-cost alternatives include allowing employees a certain number of hours of leave to attend doctors' appointments, school conferences, and the like. Some states, including Massachusetts and Vermont, have enacted legislation requiring employers to give employees 24 hours of leave for those purposes. Massachusetts calls its law the "Small Necessities Act."

You can also set up a dependent-care flexible-spending program for your employees. Those accounts allow employees to put their own money into an account before it's taxed and then pay for eligible dependent care with those pretax dollars. Other, more formal methods include offering flexible hours, telecommuting options, job sharing, or compressed workweeks.

More costly alternatives include providing on-site or nearby child care or emergency child care. That might seem like an expensive benefit with a lot of hassle for some employers. But many child-care providers will assume responsibility for starting up the program and handling all the licensing, insurance, and hiring responsibilities, allowing you to purchase their services like any other vendor. Often, several employers are able to "pool" those services, or the care provider sets aside a certain number of "slots" for your company's employees. Corporations can also receive significant tax breaks for opening qualified child-care programs.

Elder-care initiatives

Some employers offer or subsidize adult day care for the elderly relatives of their employees, but those programs are rare compared to employer-sponsored child care. In contrast with child-care needs, which tend to be fairly predictable, elder care tends to be crisis-oriented - a parent falls and breaks a hip or an apparently healthy spouse dies suddenly, leaving the less able parent alone.

Moreover, caring for elderly relatives has been shown to generate considerably more emotional stress and distraction on the job (and a resulting reduction in productivity) than child-care issues, largely, researchers believe, because employees are usually faced with the disability or impending death of a parent or in-law.

Employees often have little knowledge about elder-care options. Some no- or low-cost benefits therefore might include offering resources or referral programs in the form of a database of information about available local or national services and private or public agencies that provide elder-care services or lunchtime or after-work seminars on topics related to elder care.

Information about elder-care options or support services for employees who care for the elderly could also be posted on your intranet. Dependent-care flexible-spending programs can include care for elderly relatives, but there are significant limitations on who can qualify as a dependent under Internal Revenue Service regulations.

Another option, albeit more costly, is to offer elder-care consulting services or case-management services. Case-management services provide employees with a geriatric case manager to help them and their elderly relative develop a plan to care for the relative and assist the employee in obtaining needed services. The case manager may also monitor the relative's care for some period of time.

The benefit to you is that the case manager typically can manage the care options quickly and efficiently and reduce the amount of lost productivity because of employee absences and the distraction of researching and arranging care options on their own. You can further reduce the cost of those programs by contracting with public or private agencies to provide services on an as-needed basis.

Bottom line

Researchers have observed that programs designed to assist employees in balancing work and family demands may produce a more efficient and loyal workforce and reduce long-term training and turnover costs. Implementing programs aimed at decreasing employee problems like absenteeism, substance abuse, and turnover makes good business sense, but incorporating those programs into your benefits package may also add value to your company in ways you wouldn't have expected.

A study reported in the July 2004 issue of Cornell University's Industrial and Labor Relations Review suggests that the announcement of policies aimed at helping employees balance work and family has a direct positive effect on corporate share value. The study also suggests that "pioneers" - those who come up with new initiatives first - reap the greatest share value increase.