Something Needed to Change: Jess Ringgenberg’s Secret ELIXR
Jess Ringgenberg of ELIXR
If you’ve been around here long enough, you know that this is a hill we’ll die on: Workplaces were not built with working parents in mind, especially not working mothers.
For most parents, it comes as no surprise that caregiving is one of the biggest drivers of turnover, burnout, and underutilized benefits. So, why are leaders still ignoring the loud, persistent call for change?
In corporate America, leadership training often focuses on hard skills. Skills like strategic planning, financial acumen, or managing performance are in high demand.
During her years inside Fortune 500 and biotech organizations, Jess Ringgenberg started focusing on what was missing from all leadership training.
Across boardrooms and HR strategy sessions, Jess noticed a common thread shaping everything at work: caregiving needs. From mothers navigating maternity leave to employees balancing elder care, leaders struggled with conversations about burnout, flexibility, or loss.
For experiences that are so universal, how are the solutions so shoddy (if they exist in the first place)?
This recognition ended up becoming the foundation of ELIXR, a coaching and consulting company dedicated to helping organizations become what she calls CareConscious™.
By pairing rigorous research with practical corporate know-how, Jess has built a framework that reframes care as a strategic advantage.
The Fortune 500-Foot View of Caretaking
Jess Ringgenberg began her career in the world of big business. Holding roles across talent management, HR leadership, and corporate strategy, she often had a front-row seat to the way organizations approached people strategy. She saw the gaps that were quietly driving attrition.
We’re all familiar with the headlines. Brilliant employees leave after becoming parents because leadership can’t support their transitions. Managers shy away from conversations about caregiving. Benefits packages rolled out without training or guided application.
The message was clear: If companies couldn’t get caregiving right, they would keep bleeding talent.
Deep Caretaking Research
Anecdotes are great for coloring in a fun story, but they aren’t enough to drive meaningful business decisions.
Instead of relying solely on anecdotes, Jess turned to research to deepen her understanding. She drew on sociology, psychology, and workplace studies to examine what happens when someone becomes a mother. She didn’t begin and end on the biological impact, but how it affects a parent mentally, emotionally, and socially.
Her work led her to the concept of matrescence.
Matrescence describes the process of becoming a mother, often compared to adolescence in its scope and its impact. While rarely discussed in corporate settings, matrescence offered a critical lens for understanding why many new mothers feel so destabilized at work, but that’s not all. It also helps organizations learn how to support and empower this transition.
By publishing her report, The Science of Modern Motherhood, Jess validated the lived experience of working mothers, but she didn’t stop there.
She also gave companies a vocabulary and a framework to start addressing it. Now we’re cooking!
Introducing The CareConscious™ Framework
Leaving the stability of corporate leadership isn’t easy. Ask anyone.
But Jess knew she could have a bigger impact by building a company devoted to this mission. With ELIXR, she could work across industries, apply research at scale, and push leaders to reimagine how care and work intersect.
Out of her research, Jess developed CareConscious™ Solutions, ELIXR’s signature approach. We love a proprietary, research-based approach.
Like many of the most groundbreaking ideas, the framework’s simplicity is matched by its profundity.
If organizations make caregiving visible, intentional, and integrated into leadership practices, they don’t just support employees. They gain a competitive edge.
CareConscious™ organizations look different in practice:
Leaders are trained to talk openly about caregiving and to normalize flexibility.
Policies and benefits are aligned with real needs, rather than sitting unused in HR portals.
Culture reflects care—not just in slogans, but in everyday behavior, from leave conversations to workload distribution.
Talent strategy embraces caregiving as a dimension of employee life, not a detour from it.
Jess argues that when companies adopt this mindset, they see measurable results: higher retention, deeper engagement, stronger leadership pipelines, and a reputation as an employer of choice.
Inspiring the Next Generation of Leaders
Whenever an entrepreneur strikes out to solve (really solve) a problem that was previously seen as insurmountable, the fallout is contagious in the best way.
Jess’ journey carries an inspiring lesson for other professionals considering pivots of their own. The skills and insights you build in corporate life can become the foundation for something entirely new.
It’s all about exploring angles and asking probing questions. By asking, “What problem do I see over and over again?” and “What unique perspective can I bring to solving it?” Jess transformed observations into impact.
Her CareConscious™ mission reminds us that leadership isn’t just about driving results. It’s about recognizing the full humanity of the people we lead. In doing so, we don’t just create kinder workplaces. We create smarter, more resilient, and more profitable ones.
The math here really maths, folks!
Looking Ahead
As ELIXR grows, Jess continues to expand both the research and application of CareConscious™ leadership. For her, the future of work isn’t just about AI or hybrid models. It’s about whether organizations can fully embrace care as a central pillar of strategy.
Because, as Jess often says, care isn’t a distraction from the work — it is the work.
