This episode covers the crucial topic of supporting working caregivers with guest Ashley Blackington, the CEO and founder of Dovetail. In this conversation, she sheds light on the unique challenges caregivers face, whether they're juggling childcare, elder care, or both. We explore how caregiving impacts employees in the workplace, the importance of employer support, and innovative solutions like Ashley's care tech platform, Dovetail, that streamlines care logistics. Join us as we uncover how businesses can create more inclusive and supportive environments for their caregiving employees. You won't want to miss this conversation that bridges the gap between work and personal life in today's ever-evolving work culture.

Connect with today's guest:

Website: https://dovetaildesigns.co

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyblackington/

Podcast: https://www.andbothpodcast.com

Be a guest on Ashley's podcast: https://airtable.com/appn6w6IWipJYIuA3/pagZys7UnECzM46iJ/form

Connect with us at:

KortneyRoss.com

LinkedIn: @kortneyross

Instagram: @nextgenworkculture

Facebook: @nextgenworkculture

Welcome to the NextGen Work Culture podcast, where leaders learn

to support working parents, because being a family friendly

business isn't just a nice to have anymore. It's

essential for businesses that want to stay competitive, and it is

critical for the next generation and those who are raising them. I'm

your host, Courtney Ross, and I am so glad that you're here.

Welcome back to the NextGen Work Culture podcast. Today I'm

here with Ashley Blackington, the CEO and

founder of Dovetail. Ashley, we're happy to have you here.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah. So,

Ashley, before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit more about you

and who you are and what you do? Sure. Yeah. So I

am the founder and CEO of Dovetail. We are a

caretech platform that is

designers to streamline all of the logistics

that come along with care. So that's

my day to day. I also host a podcast called the

and both podcast, and I am a mom of four. I don't

know when that episode gets released, but it's currently August, and I am in the

thick of trying to, like, manage my own self and get everyone ready

for school. So right now, up is down and down is up.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm in Tennessee, and school has already

started here. Where are you, Athenae? I'm in New Hampshire. So

we have another two weeks before school. Yeah.

Yeah. So you're, like, right in the midst of the end of summer

chaos. Everybody is, like, at each other's throat all the time, yet you're

trying to get back to school, shopping done and all of that. Right. And everyone's

like, everyone's grown three inches and no one shoes fit, and it's just

like, you know, it's a good. It's a good mix

of chaos. And every time this comes around, this time of year, I'm

always thankful that I. This is, like, for me, it's a plus

of entrepreneurship because I have the ability to sort of

flex my schedule to get into that

and be able to have a little bit of breathing room. But, I

mean, you always pay for it on the back end. So, like, the whole, like,

you don't have free time. You just have flex time is how I like to

look at it. Yeah. If you take a week off in the summer, then that's

a week later on, that's going to be twice as busy. Yeah. Or

you're just, like, shoehorning it into, like, you know, I always say, like, the

nooks and crannies of, of your day. And that's where, that's where you

make up all that time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very much working in the nooks

and crannies myself right now. I've got a two year old and a four year

old, and we only have, like, part time daycare, so I'm

very much a nooks and cranny worker. Yeah, it's, it

is not for the faint of heart. So I'm like, I'm right there

with you on. You're doing an amazing job. Like,

it's, it's so hard. It's, no matter what it

is. And, I mean, we're entrepreneurs and can sort of set our own

schedules, but what about people who, you know, don't necessarily have

that sort of control or flexibility? So let's kind of dive into

talking about employees or in the workplace. How can, how does

caregiving, being a caregiver really impact somebody at

work? I think the biggest thing

and one of the things that I'm trying to address is the fact that

there is this general disconnect between

employees and employers when it comes to caregiving.

I think there's a lot of focus that's been, and rightfully

so, and it's overdue on parents and

as employees in the workforce. And I'm so excited

to see, like, this is a topic of conversation that is coming on,

like, in terms of, like, programming and

workshops and options and all of that stuff. There's also

the next level of it. And I think that that really sort of came to

light more in the, after the pandemic or during the pandemic

where people were taking loved ones out of, like,

assisted living facilities or people were not able to transition into those

facilities. And so people were put in this position of

trying to care for an older adult. And that's not really something

that's ever sort of been focused on when it comes to a

workplace or an employee perspective.

And I think what's really important about

that is that this is a population that is growing,

these caregivers and especially these sandwich caregivers, people that are looking

after aging adults or people with long term disability

or illness, and they're also raising children. But there's not

really a lot of conversation that's happening around it. So

I'm really encouraged by the fact that the parenting conversation is

coming so strong at this point in time, and it's kind

of everywhere. It's in the presidential debate

of months ago, and it's in the news, and people are

talking about programming and care and things like that. But there's

this growing population of people that are

caregivers that don't necessarily fit into the

parenting tool and how things are marketed towards them. And I think that

that creates an opportunity for them to be

excluded out of the conversation, not on purpose. It's just

not open. And that's one of the things that I really want

to focus on is this idea of care is care, and it

doesn't really matter who you're caring for.

There's similar logistics when it comes to caring for an aging

person and when it comes to parenting a young

child. And so to try and open that conversation

between employers and employees and then

begin to think about ways that that is going to impact them in their

day to day function in the office. Yeah. So we talk a lot

about, you mentioned logistics there. We talk about the logistics of

parenting and summer camps in the summer and having to figure out childcare

and all of that. What kind of, you know, logistical things

are caregivers of, you know, elder or older

people dealing with? Yeah, there's, there's the

logistics of, you know, doctor's appointments and

trying to get insurance coverage and things like that. Like, there's

a lot of, there's a lot of gaps that I don't

think that anybody knows about when it comes to

care for the, for the elderly and

the, you know, in the long term disabled in this country that

are historically filled by unpaid caregivers.

And they're historically filled by unpaid caregivers. Because when it comes to trying

to bring in somebody on a professional level, it's so

expensive because there just aren't that many. There just aren't that

many. There aren't enough people right now that

are doing, that are able to train and provide care

for aging people in this country to meet the needs

of what is coming down the line. I mean, 10,000 people a day

are hitting age 65 in this country every single day from

now until 2030. So by the time. Yeah, by the time

you get to the end of this decade, one in, I believe it's one in

four. It's either one in four or one in five Americans is going to be

over 65. We're going to be. Yeah.

And end of, end of that

lifespan heavy population, and we don't have the

people that are coming up and moving into positions where they work

in those industries. And it's frankly. Cause you don't make enough money to do

that and survive. Yeah. Yeah. People are realizing that the

caregiving space isn't really a great way to make a living, I guess, you know,

so we don't have enough people coming into that. So, I mean, that's a whole

other issue is how could we, you know, get more caregivers?

The same goes for, like, daycare employees or teachers or anything

in care, I think, right now. But we'll save that for

another day. It's a long

episode. Yeah, exactly.

There's a lot of logistics that go into taking care

of somebody who's aging. And I know my mom is kind of

the primary person to help out her mom right now because unfortunately,

her brother passed away a while back. And so it's just her. She's the only

sibling, she's the only one close enough. Cause me and my brother don't live close

enough to help out. And so it's all on her, you know, and I can

see that from the outside looking in, like, how much that's impacting

her. She did actually quit her, like, full time job,

and she has a store. She's an entrepreneur as well. So she could kind of

set her goal, her hours, but she kind of

is a little bit, I guess, stuck in that because there's very, very

few full time roles that have the flexibility that she would need or that would

allow her enough time off or whatever to take her mom to all the doctor's

appointments and such. Yeah, I mean, it's, there's so

many, you're talking about conversations with insurance. You're talking

about appointments and so many of the things, things that

happen around, like the care management side, are things that happen Monday

to Friday, 09:00 to 05:00 like, you can't make a call to your insurance company

00 at night. And I think that's the part

that if you're going to meet a caregiver, an employee

caregiver, where they're at, there has to be some

sort of acknowledgement and space around that

because it really is, when they say, if you are the

primary caregiver, like your mom, if she's the primary caregiver and she needs to make

a call to an insurance company, she doesn't have the option. So

she's stuck between a rock and a hard place. Right. And that's what happens is

people get wedged into this position and they're like, okay, well,

I have to, I have to either shift down the number of hours that I

can work or I have to find another job, and then that not only

impacts her, that opens up time. Right. For

her to be able to do more to take care of her mom, but that

also impacts her physically, it impacts her financially, impacts

every other part of her world because she is

now putting that space and that energy into that,

into that care. Yeah, that's a lot. So

how can an employer help with this, other than kind of having

some compassion and understanding? Is there anything that employers should be

doing? I think that the biggest problem is that

because we don't talk about it as an employee, you don't want to bring it

up to your employer because you might feel like it's the

same thing that used to happen when women were pregnant, and they

would, they didn't want to bring it up because then all of a sudden

you get stuck in the track of, like, the mommy track, right, where you, it's

like, well, you're going to be out of work. And there's this, like,

assumption around, like, dedication and all of that stuff that's just

frankly not true. I mean, people want to go to work and they want to

do a good job and they want to do all that, but they also are

people that existed outside of the regular workday.

So I think the most crucial piece is

for employers to figure out how many employees

are actually in this position, because a lot of

what is coming on to the market in terms of products

that are designed for this space may not

necessarily be getting picked up by employers as an offering

for their employees because they don't think that they have that concern

at work. So if you don't know about a problem, you can't start to address

the problem. And employees, there has to be sort of a

bridge between the two, right? So employers have to make it a possible, like a

safe, constructive, collaborative

conversation with these employees about

acknowledging, like saying, this is my situation.

This is what it means to me. Employers, like you're saying, having

compassion, and also like

employees speaking up and saying, yes, because I think a lot of times what we

do is because of this inherent piece, especially, like,

as women in employed women caregivers,

like, women are, more than 70% of caregivers are

women, employed caregivers are women. So

if employed caregivers that already make less money on the

dollar and there's all sorts of other, I mean, that's a whole episode

all on its own. There's all sorts of other factors that pile into that.

It's like you get farther and farther away from feeling like it's something that you

can open up about and address with your employer. So there has to be a

space where they can come together. And then employers need

to look for options and benefits that are going

to help them meet that employee's needs, because that's what's going to

drive retention. That's what's going to, that's what's going to downshift the

churn of employees. That's what's going to make it possible for people to hire

and retain talent, because we don't live in the

society where somebody graduates college or graduates high school and they get a

job and they work in that job for, like, 40 years, and then they get

a watch and a cake, and, like, there you go. Like, people, people switch jobs,

like, every three to five years. And the reason people switch jobs is not

because, like, they don't want to do that job anymore. It's because the

job doesn't fit their life. So if an employer wants somebody who's in that

job, who is the most talented, and they don't want to

spend upwards of two times their salary trying to hire somebody

to fill that space, they need to meet their employees where they're at, because

that's, honestly, it's cheaper to just offer benefits than it is to try

and replace that person. Yeah, it is. It's so, so much

easier and cheaper to just keep the employees you have keep around

long enough to give them a watch and a cake at the end. Yes. Yes.

We're all just aiming for the watch and the cake.

I love that. So, speaking of benefits, what kind of benefits

are out there for caregiving? You know, I know,

you know, for childcare, we have, like, backup care options or

on site care or childcare stipends or breastfeeding support, all

kinds of benefits. And, like, the childcare side of things. What about the

other end of life? What kind of benefit options even exist?

There are. I mean, there's. There's benefit options, thankfully, that are coming out,

like, for all sort of different levels now, which is really nice. Like,

there are some, there are some benefits that are basically

a, it's basically private case management. So

you have, you can call and say, my mom

is living at home. I need to find somebody to help me with this, this

and this. And they will help you find that. Like, there's. You

have basically a private case manager that will, that will help with those

services. You can also. There's respite. So people

that say, you know, I need to. My

background is clinical. I probably should have mentioned that in the beginning. My background is

clinical, and I. So we would have people that would come in and they would

be primary caregivers, and they would the person that they cared

for would go into skilled nursing for, like, a week or

two, and that person would, their caregiver would then have

their knee surgery, or they would have whatever was happening, and

then they would recuperate and get a go through the process that they needed

to go through, and then they would go back to being the caregiver. So that

it's kind of like a bridge to that. And so

the option to have things like that are coming online

more in terms of, like, having somebody be able to come and

check on that person during the day. And then there's also things like. Like

dovetail. I mean, let's throw it. So tell us more. Tell us more about dovetail.

So dovetail is a logistics management platform. So

what it is designed to do is it is designed to be a

space where you can put everything. You create your own private

family network that includes the person that you're providing care for.

So my background in occupational therapy is all

about meeting the needs of that person and having

that person being the driving force behind the decisions in their

care. And I think that that is something

that is not available right now on the market so much. And I

think that part of the problem with this caregiving

conversation between a caregiver and the person they're caring for

is that somebody who requires

care, and that can be something as simple as, like, can you pick up some

stuff from the grocery store? For me, the fear that that person has

around, once I ask somebody to help me with one thing, all of a

sudden I'm going to lose my car keys, I'm going to lose my house, I'm

going to lose my ability to make all of my decisions. And so what they

do is they wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. And then where

there could be a smooth transition and they could

be functionally independent for as long as possible.

Now keeps getting kicked down the road until there's some sort of event.

And because my, because of my background, that's

somebody falls, somebody has to have surgery, and there's

some sort of event that happens, and then that person is

no longer able to make all of the decisions in a way that they would

have before. Somebody has to make those decisions for them. So their kid

has to make decisions about what their home setup is going to look like now

that they need equipment, their kid is going to be the one that jumps in

and takes over the logistics of doctor's appointments and follow

ups and therapies and things like that. So with dovetail,

the idea is that that person and their family

create their own network so that person can help,

help be a part of the conversation about who is helping them.

Because I don't know a single family. And I mean,

if you're that family, like, call me, because I don't know a single family

where someone is just like, we all just get along and,

like, everyone is, you know, we hold hands

and we all just, like, saying, like, someone drives somebody crazy and someone is like,

I'm not comfortable with that person being a part of it or whatever.

And so establishing that network means that you're

acting on behalf of the care recipient and able

to pull in people as needed. So, like, for you, for example,

if your mom is like, I can't get to the grocery store, or I

can't get to this, or I can't get to this, she's able to say, this

is the stuff I need. She can include you in it,

and you can say, okay, I can help with this thing, but that doesn't mean

that your mom has to text you and all of this stuff. You're just a

part of the care network. And so it happens in a very synced and

non, you know, 50 million messages overlapping, which I think is

what contributes to a lot of the overwhelm that happens with care

logistics. Yeah, absolutely. You know, that could

be helping someone, even, like, across the country, be able to still be

involved if they don't live close enough to help. Maybe they're in charge of

ordering all of the supplies or something.

My mom actually probably transitioned mostly into caregiver when her dad was sick.

He had cancer and eventually went on home health and all of that. So I

know that, like, just ordering all of the stuff,

making sure he had a colonoscopy and had to have a bag. So making sure

that all of that stuff was always in stock before he ran out. And, like,

that was almost a full time job just staying on the phone with these places,

and it was a lot. Yeah. So I

could see where, you know, even a task like that could be offloaded to

somebody who can't physically be there and help,

but could help with other things. And it would be so much easier to just

have it all in one place. Yeah. Because it really is.

Like, what happens is, you know, we all sort of chase a pile of sticky

notes around or a notepad or, like, a back of an envelope or, like,

a note on your phone or however you do it, but that

doesn't have a way to interact with anything else. So you really can't just shut

that off to another place. And like you're saying,

like, families are not in this country, families are not as big

as they used to be, and families are not geographically as close as they used

to be. Like, it's. It's nothing. It's not abnormal to

have kids, and one lives on the west coast and one lives on the east

coast and one lives in Texas, and everyone comes together for the holidays. But when

it comes to care for aging

people, most of that historically has been done

in a setup that is not really the norm anymore.

Families live close together, and they were right down the road, or they could help

with that. And so how do we make it possible

for somebody to receive as much care in that regard,

which saves time for the caregiver, which

saves finances, which saves all of these pieces

in a way that doesn't overwhelm everybody, because what happens in those

situations, somebody ends up being the manager of all

this. You end up being the case manager, and that's a full time job along

with all of the other pieces underneath that.

Yeah. So it looked like I was kind of snooping around on your website. It

looked like in the app, you have, like, you can add a shopping list and

then send that straight to Amazon or target or a few other partners. Like, that's

really cool. Tell us what else in the actual app, what would we find?

Yeah, so, yeah, you can shop directly from there. So right now

there is Amazon, Target, Costco, and Whole Foods. And so

what happens is it actually comes up within the app. So it's

not like you switch from the app to another

app, which is a feature that I, as a parent,

really need. Because what happens is I'm like, oh, I'll make a list of all

of the things that I need to do. And then it's hard to remember if

you put it in this list or if you put it in this list. So

this way, you can go around and it works for all of

this. But you can go around and make a list of all the things you

need. And then you can fill up these shopping carts as you,

as you go through. And so you can,

you can really check it off from inside the note. But if you get

interrupted, like one of your kids needs something or the phone rings or

whatever, you don't lose your place and you don't end up having to circle around

and chase your tail on that. So that's one of the things that's really important.

Another thing that I think is really important is there's sort

of a, there's a track of communication.

So when you share a note with somebody in that network, they get

an email or they get a text message, you choose, but they get a

notification that this has been shared with them. But on your end,

you also have a note that you also have

it inside your note that you shared it with them. So it's

not that, like, did I send that thing to them? I'm not really sure.

And then the third kind of big change in that is that you

can within shared calendar, a shared calendar and a

shared note, it's, you're able to track stuff, like,

especially with medical appointments. It's really hard because we don't have like a

universal medical record in this

country. And so what happens is if you have multiple people that are taking

somebody to a doctor's appointment or they're working in therapy or whatever it

is, what ends up happening is you're trying to communicate what is

going on there. And you say you're sitting in a doctor's appointment, for

one thing, and they say, oh, you met with cardiology last week. What did they

say? Now you've got to go through text messages or email or

voicemail or all of that stuff. This way you can create your own

record and say, okay, that appointment was on Wednesday. I'm going to look it

up. And that person who took them to cardiology can take a picture

of whatever the lab results were. They can take a picture

of whatever the summary is, or they can write notes in there.

And then going forward, if you're not going to be the one that takes somebody

to that appointment, but you have questions, you can put those

in. And so the person who's sitting in the office with the care

recipient has all of the information

literally at their fingertips that they need in order for the

person that is receiving care to be,

to have everything be as streamlined as possible. Well, that

is really awesome that everything is organized in one place. I

imagine even if you're the only person taking a mom or dad

or uncle or whoever to the doctor, it's really nice to have everything organized in

one app instead of having to schlep the papers around with you or

go scrolling back through your pictures trying to find,

oh, I think I took a picture of that paper or whatever. So

that's really cool. Is the app already available

or when is this launching? Yeah, so

the app is, there's a waitlist up right now for

the consumer edition of it in the late fall,

winter, we're launching our corporate pilot. And so

this is first and foremost designed to be a product

that companies will offer as part of a benefits

package to their employees. And a big driver

of that is so that this conversation around

caregiving starts to take place. And so

that will launch in the fall and winter, and

once that pilot launches, then the individual

consumer app will be available on the app store.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think this will be such a great benefit for

employers to be able to offer. But also, like you said, it's just, you know,

starting the conversation like, this is something your people might need

because you have a lot more caregivers on your staff than you probably realize.

Yeah. And I also think too, like, when it was, this did

start out as a, as a parent, nuclear family kind of space,

because, you know, we only, we only create solutions to our own problems. And for

me, it was like, there's too many things, and the other part, too is like,

there's too many things that I am fundamentally responsible for that I don't

need to be. Like, I'm the person that's, like, that's,

that's managing all of this, whereas I have a

partner who is able to, you know, he's a

fully functioning adult human and he can do this stuff. But the thing

that kept, that kept, like, cutting that

process short was that the amount of information that I

held and the amount of information that he needed was always

a mismatch in order for things to happen. But the only way to do that

is for me to, you can't really ever fundamentally pass something

off. And so dovetail is designed to be kind

of like, I talk about it as like a virtual coffee table. Like, I take

the information and I put it on the coffee table, and then he can pick

up the information and pull it from there. And that's the idea is like,

when you have, like, a care network of things and you have somebody that's

still doing the administrative management piece, it's not actually a

relief for them. But if you have a care network where all of the information

lives outside of one person, then that

provides that relief to overwhelm, that helps take that

person down from being the one who has to,

like, oversee everything and gives them the

opportunity to free up the bandwidth so that they can do stuff like

work when they are at work, so that they can,

they can truly pass off these tasks so they can close the tab, whatever,

you know, whatever reference you want to make. It's like, you can work

with 30 tabs open, but if you have 60 open, like, your computer is

running slow, so it's just trying to alleviate the overwhelm on

behalf of the administrator and also create the

opportunity for that equity and caregiving piece that

really makes everything better for everybody. Yeah.

Well, that's awesome. Ashley, thank you so much for coming on today. This was such

an insightful conversation and I can't wait to see

dovetail in the future. Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited.

There's the waitlist is up, so if anyone is interested in

it, it is on Dovetaildesigns Co. And you can

sign up and you'll get an email when it launches. All right, cool. And I'll

be sure that there's a link for that in the show notes as well. Thank

you. Thank you. Ashley.

If you enjoyed this episode, I know you'll love the future ready work

culture framework. Head over to courtneyross.com

framework to download your copy and start building a family

friendly, future ready workplace today. Don't

forget to subscribe to the Nextgen work culture so you never miss an

episode. I'd love it if you'd also take a moment to leave a

review. Until next time, take care.