What to do in the workplace when an employee is a carer for someone with cancer

With half of Australians facing cancer in their lifetime, there is a good chance your workplace will have employees who need to care for a loved one with cancer. 

How your business handles situations like these, including how to support the carer in the workplace can have repercussions across your entire organisation. Being someone who has lost a partner to cancer I wanted to share my own story with you. To show how a business can support an employee through the caring process as well as cover what can be helpful for management to know to support a staff member through the process. 

My Story

When my partner Mike was going through testing, before we found out that he had cancer, the company I worked for was really supportive in making sure I was available to attend his appointments. I had a business trip to the Hunter Valley and my directors were fantastic. They told me to come along and to drive my own car, that way if I needed to leave at short notice, I could.

So the communication with my employer was there from the start. This was also because I was good at keeping them informed about what was going on. There was a lot of uncertainty around this time and my directors did little things that really made a big difference to me. For example, we had one car park space at the office that was for one of the company directors. On the days where he didn’t drive in or wasn’t coming to work, I was the first person given the choice to have that park. Because they knew that it would make it easier for me to get to the hospital following finishing work.

What a lot of people don’t understand about chemotherapy is it’s different for each person and there are different cocktails of drugs that they give you depending on the type of cancer. I knew over time that for Mike there were going to be some days while he was receiving treatment that were going to be worse than others. So on those days, the company allowed me to go to the hospital with him. I would take my laptop and when he was either sleeping or resting, I was able to log in and complete around half a day’s work.

I wasn’t able to text and answer phone calls, but I was able to do other tasks during this time. And then on the days where he would be in the hospital and staying overnight, I would go to work during the day and attend hospital in the evening. My team and directors knew that there was absolutely no way I would be able to stay late on those days. At the end of the working day, I would rush straight to the hospital with food and I would spend the entire evening with him, only returning home to sleep and then return back to work. 

This would be for a couple of days, every single week for the length of his chemo. I believe that because one of my directors had actually been through chemotherapy himself, he knew it wasn’t just all about the days when you were in the hospital. He really seemed to understand the situation. When I moved to a new company, my boss wasn’t so understanding, possibly because he had never personally been through it or known anyone that had. 

What was most important for me when caring for Mike was being given a degree of flexibility, because the situation with someone with cancer is ever changing.  With Mike, there’d be days where we would need to go into hospital when he had issues like a spike in his temperature. If he was sent home then I’d end up going into the office. 

What was important was that I kept communicating with the team. I needed to let them know that there were going to be days where I would say that I wouldn’t be able to come in but might end up coming in if Mike was doing well. I knew that that could be seen as disruptive, but I was just trying to work the best way I could under the circumstances.

What I would do was make my calendar available to my whole team so that they could see when I was going to be out of the office and why. This allowed them to know what was going on. It wasn’t something that was just kept between my directors and me. 

What would have been helpful as an employee

It’s really important for companies and leadership teams to be able to have some basic knowledge and understanding around the fact that different cancers can have quite a different effect on a person including what treatment plan they have. 

Whether it’s the carer or somebody going through cancer, it is important the team understands the uncertainty of the situation that a cancer diagnosis brings. Things might be going absolutely great and then suddenly that person ends up getting an infection and plans can change. Meaning, they can’t have chemotherapy when they thought they were going to have treatment. So they end up having it later, which changes the carer’s schedule without much warning. 

What I found in my experience was that it was good to have regular check-ins. Whether it’s a phone call or face to face. But importantly, this needs to be done in an empathetic way and not just an opportunity for the manager to explain the inconvenience of what the carer role is having on the team.

Making sure your immediate colleagues have an in-depth explanation as to what’s going on is also important. Because for me in the new company I worked for, my team didn’t properly understand what was going on. All they knew was that I was caring for my partner with cancer. There just wasn’t a great amount of communication.

What management needs to be able to do effectively is deliver information to the team that accommodating a carer isn’t special treatment, instead it is flexibility on account of the unfortunate circumstances that person is in. But it’s also about understanding the privacy of the individual or the person who has cancer. It is crucial that you have their permission before revealing that information to colleagues.

Another element of the experience of being a carer who still needs to work is that it would have been helpful if colleagues could understand that it can be hard to contact them during the times when they are at the hospital. My team found this very frustrating.

I remember when Mike passed away, I informed all of my team and took time off. I took two weeks off during and after the funeral. At the time I had clients that were being interviewed for a role. So I had let them all know I wasn’t going to be available and told them who the person was to contact. I did a handover to one of my colleagues and gave instruction on what was happening.

My colleague missed sending some information to my clients and I was on my way to the funeral. I was in the car behind the hearse and my phone kept ringing. I ended up answering because this person wasn’t going to stop calling. It was my client saying they had arrived and no-one was there. They were shouting down the phone to me and I had to apologise and ask them to call my colleagues about it, as I was on my way to the funeral.

That was a complete lack of communication and a colleague not stepping up with their responsibility when they really need to be there. It was such a horrible experience.

In times like this, both team members and management need to step up. So, if a grieving colleague cannot take something on, management needs to be managing the allocation of workload.

How management can benefit from a policy for carers

It’s important to have plans and processes in place for when an employee is caring or grieving for someone with cancer because cancer doesn’t just stop when treatment stops. It keeps on going for the individual, for the family and for their loved ones.

Creating a policy for employees caring or grieving loved ones with cancer doesn’t just benefit the individual, it benefits the whole team and it benefits management. It’s about being able to set up policies for when these situations happen and ensure everyone is aware of the policy. As well, it is an opportunity to create clear parameters to follow in terms of how much leave someone is able to take and what other options are available and how to coordinate the rest of the team to be able to step up for that person in those times of need.

The reality is anyone in any organisation could be in this position at any time. If people know that there is a policy in place, then when or if the situation does happen to someone, they can feel at ease knowing they’re going to be supported. They know that there is going to be support and that it’s been communicated throughout the organisation, that ‘this’ is what we do in these situations.

MyMuse works with businesses and organisations across Australia and New Zealand. MyMuse develops proactive approaches for businesses as well as case by case basis when required. To discuss your needs or learn what is involved in co-designing a workshop or program with the MyMuse team of experts, phone on 0420 790 091 or fill in this contact form and we will be in touch shortly.

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