The Albany Gazette - Elixr Debuts Careconscious, Formalizes Caregiving as a Measurable Business Strategy and Names Global HR Executive Elle Lebourg Co-Founder

DALLAS, TX / ACCESS Newswire / February 18, 2026 / ELIXR, a diagnostics-led workforce strategy and solutions firm, today unveiled CareConscious™, a proprietary system designed to help organizations identify, measure, and manage caregiving-related workforce risks that often go unseen in traditional corporate strategies. The company also announced that Elle Lebourg has officially joined ELIXR as Managing Partner and Co-Founder, after serving in an advisory capacity over the past year.

CareConscious™ is built for a workforce reality that most organizations already face: eight in ten employees are caregivers-employees responsible for a child, partner, parent, or family member-yet few companies have systems established to make caregiving visible as an operating condition across performance, policy, and retention decisions. The result is a material business impact. U.S. businesses lose an estimated $50 billion annually due to caregiving-related absenteeism, productivity loss, and turnover, while replacing a single caregiving employee can cost up to $200,000 end to end.

"CareConscious™ formalizes our diagnostic-led approach to workforce strategy, built to translate caregiving realities into executive decisions, operational clarity, and measurable ROI," said Jess Ringgenberg, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of ELIXR. "The framework reflects our belief that care is not personal or soft, and that with the right systems, care and performance can coexist."

Introducing CareConscious™

CareConscious™ is delivered through ELIXR's proprietary organization-specific census, insights reporting, and advisory framework. Unlike traditional surveys or engagement tools, CareConscious™ is designed for risk discovery, surfacing where caregiving-related constraints quietly undermine performance, productivity, and return on investment. While most organizations already invest significantly in hiring, benefits, engagement, leadership development, and risk mitigation, they often lack the workforce data needed to protect those investments from hidden caregiving-related risk. The system helps organizations identify where caregiving intersects with the employee lifecycle, such as leave, return-to-work, performance cycles, advancement timing, and policy execution, and translate those insights into clear, practical action.

The CareConscious™ process begins with an anonymous, third-party workforce survey that captures both quantitative and qualitative data across an organization's workforce or segmented by group or department. Using this organization-specific data, ELIXR then delivers a detailed insights report followed by an executive strategy and advising phase focused on prioritizing urgent and critical actions. This work translates findings into concrete recommendations, including systems improvements, training, benefits optimization, communications, and policy refinement.

"In 20 years of researching and partnering with leading corporations, I've seen how often organizations underestimate the cumulative impact of caregiving and parenting in the workforce," said Jennifer Fraone, Workforce Research Advisor at ELIXR and former Executive Director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family. "ELIXR's CareConscious™ system brings much-needed clarity to how care realities affect capacity, attrition, benefits, and ROI. I'm proud to serve as an advisor and believe this approach will drive meaningful change for workplaces and families alike."

"CareConscious maps caregiving realities to the employee lifecycle so the right supports show up at the right moments," said Ringgenberg. "It also turns existing investments, like benefits and policies, into tools employees can actually find and use."

Organizations and leaders that complete the CareConscious™ process are eligible for CareConscious™ Certification, which signals a deliberate, data-backed commitment to aligning workforce systems with real employee needs. Certification is not pay-to-play; it reflects participation in the census and advisory work and a shared commitment to continuous improvement.

ELIXR has supported organizations ranging from SMBs to Fortune 100 across various sectors including biotech, life sciences, enterprise tech, industrial supply, and healthcare to date. Early pilot engagements demonstrated clear impact, including improved policy clarity, stronger and more consistent communications strategies, increased manager confidence in supporting caregivers, and greater organizational readiness to sustain performance through workforce pressure.

In one completed CareConscious™ engagement, 70% of employees participated, 100% of participating employees reported greater confidence in assessing their benefits, and 100% of managers said they felt better equipped to support caregivers. The program earned a 100% recommendation rate among participants, and all executive sponsors and stakeholders endorsed working with ELIXR again, signaling meaningful improvements in organizational clarity, confidence, and readiness.

Elle Lebourg Joins ELIXR

Lebourg brings global HR executive experience shaped by both high-performance and people-centered environments. She spent eight years at Hilti, most recently serving as Global Head of Talent Acquisition, and previously held senior roles at AB InBev. Over the past year, she has worked closely with ELIXR in an advisory capacity, contributing to CareConscious™ system design and enterprise-level application.

"Performance does not disappear when you care about people," said Lebourg. "It gets stronger when systems are designed to support the full reality of their lives. CareConscious™ creates the structure organizations need to do that consistently."

Her formal onboarding reflects ELIXR's continued focus on delivering diagnostic-backed workforce strategy through experienced leadership and execution within the $6 trillion care economy. To learn more and schedule a call, visit: https://www.elixrsolutions.co/careconscious.

ABOUT ELIXR:

ELIXR is a Dallas-based diagnostics-led workforce strategy and solutions firm that helps organizations make caregiving visible and turn hidden risk, lost productivity, and wasted spend into measurable ROI through proprietary research, workforce systems, and CareConscious™ certification. Founded in 2023, ELIXR partners with companies across industries to improve performance continuity, reduce preventable attrition, and strengthen manager and policy execution by addressing caregiving as a core operating condition of today's care-majority workforce. Learn more at https://www.elixrsolutions.co/.

MEDIA CONTACT: Nina Pfister, MAG PR at [email protected]

SOURCE: ELIXR

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