The second full-time job your employees never mention.
Between raising kids and caring for aging parents, a large share of your workforce is running a shift that never ends. You feel it as scattered focus and unplanned absence. What you rarely hear is what's actually behind it.
A dependable employee steps out of a meeting to take a call, again. They're logging odd hours, distracted by lunch, and burning vacation days in ones and twos with no trip to show for it. You can see the pattern in the work. What you can't see is the second job waiting for them the moment they close their laptop: an aging parent who needs coordinating, medicating, driving, and worrying about, on top of the children still at home.
This isn't a fringe situation. In 2022, 42 percent of Canadians aged 15 and older provided some form of care to children or to adults with a long-term condition or disability.1 A share of them are doing both at once, the group often called the sandwich generation, and they're disproportionately mid-career professionals, the people you count on most.
A shift that doesn't clock out
The hours are real. Canadians caring for a parent spend a median of eight hours a week on it, and those caring for a spouse or an adult child spend around 20, on top of a full workweek.2 Add young children to that and the math stops working. There aren't enough hours, so something gives, and often it's sleep, health, and the mental margin that focused work depends on. Over half of unpaid caregivers report feeling tired because of it, and many feel worried or anxious.3
Most of this load is invisible to you because it's made of small things. A pharmacy that closes at five. A specialist who only calls back during business hours. A parent who falls on a Tuesday. None of it fits neatly into evenings and weekends, so it bleeds into the workday as interruptions, distraction, and absences that look random until you know the reason.
How it shows up at work
The impact isn't subtle to the people managing it. In 2022, 16 percent of unpaid caregivers had to adjust their work schedule to keep up, 7 percent cut their weekly hours, and 5 percent found themselves unable to hold a paid job at all.4 For sandwiched caregivers the pressure is heavier still. Around a third have had to adjust their schedules, and among those not yet retired, roughly two-thirds say caregiving has affected their employment or their ability to seek new work.5
This is the part employers feel directly. Not a dramatic breakdown, but a slow erosion of availability and focus that can stretch on for years, because eldercare rarely resolves. It escalates. A parent who needs a few errands this year needs full coordination the next, and the employee absorbs every step of that decline quietly, because they don't want to be seen as less committed.
Why standard benefits don't reach it
Most companies point to the EAP and assume caregiving is covered. It isn't, not in any meaningful way. Coordinating a parent's care is a logistical and emotional project that runs for months or years across health systems, housing, finances, and family dynamics. A few generic counselling sessions don't touch that, and exhausted caregivers know it, which is why so few of them reach for it.
What actually helps is practical, expert support that carries the coordination load with them: someone who knows the systems, anticipates the next stage, and replaces the midnight scramble with a plan. The people we coach describe the same relief, the sense that they finally have a guide instead of facing it alone at 2 a.m. When the chaos gets contained, the focus comes back, and the quiet decision to step back or step away never has to be made.
Your caregiving employees won't announce this. They'll keep absorbing it until they can't. The organizations that get ahead of it build the support in early, and protect the focus, attendance, and loyalty of some of their most reliable people.