The executor's hidden second job.
Settling an estate isn't a week of paperwork after the funeral. It's a year or more of probate, filings, and phone calls that all happen on business days, inside your employee's working hours. Here's the real weight of it, and who carries it.
When your employee came back after their father's funeral, everyone assumed the hard part was behind them. It wasn't. They'd just been named executor, and the job that comes with those three days off doesn't end when the leave does. It runs for a year, sometimes longer, and almost every piece of it has to happen between nine and five, when the courts, banks, and government offices are open, which is exactly when your employee is supposed to be working for you.
Settling an estate in Canada is not a quick administrative wrap-up. Most estates take somewhere between twelve and eighteen months to close, long enough that the profession has a name for it, the "executor's year."1 In Ontario, the probate court step alone often runs six to eight weeks, and the full settlement typically stretches to eight to twelve months or well beyond for anything complicated.2 Your employee is booked into that timeline whether or not they know it yet.
A part-time job nobody applied for
The scale of the work surprises almost everyone who takes it on. One analysis of estate administration put the average executor's effort at around 570 hours spread across roughly 16 months, with most falling between 500 and 700 hours.3 That's the equivalent of a substantial part-time job layered on top of a full-time one, and it doesn't come with training. It's cataloguing assets, closing accounts, filing the deceased's final tax return, chasing institutions that each want a different document, notarized, in triplicate, and mailed rather than emailed.
None of it waits politely for the weekend. Banks close at five. Probate registries keep court hours. The lawyer can only call back during the day. So the executor steps out for another appointment, takes another call at their desk, and books another afternoon off, and the pattern repeats for months. To a manager watching from the outside, it looks like an unusually distracted stretch. The reason behind it, a whole second job being run quietly from the corner of the workday, almost never gets named.
The impact lands on the employer
This isn't a niche problem. In a poll of people who had served as executor, more than four in ten said the process took longer than a full year, and nearly a third said it ran past two years.4 Almost two thirds said it disrupted their personal and professional lives.4 Those aren't disengaged employees. They're often your most responsible people, the ones a family trusts with this exact job, and the workplace feels the drain precisely because they refuse to let either responsibility slip entirely.
What makes it heavier is that they're doing it while grieving. The estate is a legal and financial marathon running on top of the loss of a parent or a spouse, and standard benefits don't touch it. An EAP offers a few counselling calls. It doesn't help someone understand probate, sequence the filings, or figure out which account to close first. So the executor absorbs all of it alone, and the cost shows up in your quarter.
What support looks like
The gap here is knowledge and sequencing, not sympathy. When someone has a guide who knows the estate process, who can lay out the steps in order and tell them what's coming next, the whole thing stops being a fog of ad-hoc afternoons and becomes a plan they can execute efficiently. That's the core of our Next Chapter estate support: practical, informed, and steady across the full timeline, so the executor's second job stops bleeding into the first.
Your employee won't put "settling my mother's estate" on a leave form, because there's no form for it. That's the whole point. The organizations that hold on to their best people build the support before the burden arrives, and get a focused, loyal employee back instead of a slow, silent departure.