Keeping your best people when life gets complicated

Somewhere on your team right now, a strong, senior performer is quietly slipping — distracted, taking scattered days, pulling back from the work they used to drive — and the explanation isn't the one it looks like. As a Forbes analysis of the workforce caregiving crisis put it, caregiving "doesn't show up on a claim line," but it shows up "in the performance improvement plan, in the leave that follows and, eventually, in the resignation."¹ The person you're about to misread as disengaged is often running a second, invisible job: coordinating an aging parent's care.

Why work-life balance keeps failing your most senior people

When a senior employee can't find balance no matter how much flexibility you extend, it's tempting to read it as overwork or weak boundaries. But your most senior people are also the most likely to be in the sandwich-generation window — old enough to have aging parents, senior enough to carry your hardest work. About 1 in 5 workers is now a caregiver, up from roughly 1 in 7 in 2020, and 29% of caregivers care for both children and aging parents at once.² SHRM named caregiving a top-five workplace issue for 2026 in large part because of where that load concentrates.³

So the "balance" they're missing isn't between work and leisure. It's between work and a second shift of records, appointments, and provider calls — work that, by its nature, has to happen during business hours, which is why it bleeds straight into the job.

See the data on the administrative half of caregiving →

You're probably reading the signal wrong

The visible signs of overload and disengagement are identical: less initiative, slower responses, withdrawal from optional work, scattered absences, a focused person suddenly scattered. The instinct is to read it as a motivation or fit problem and respond with coaching or pressure. But a high performer rarely loses motivation overnight — they hit a capacity wall.

A few ways to tell capacity from disengagement, without prying:

• Disengagement tends to be directional and content-specific: the person has soured on the work, the team, or the direction, and it surfaces in what they say.
• Overload tends to be pattern-based and content-neutral: the work quality is intact when they can get to it, but availability and follow-through have become erratic — often alongside a recent change in their personal circumstances.
• Distraction that runs all day, even at the desk, points to an open loop the person can't close — a pending callback, an unresolved appointment, a decision in motion. Caregiving generates exactly that ambient cognitive load.

You don't have to diagnose it. You have to create a low-pressure opening and offer the right kind of help. Part of why this stays hidden: only about half of caregivers ever tell their manager, because raising a hand feels like admitting their family situation has become a workplace liability.¹

Flexibility fixes timing, not load

Over the last few years employers leaned hard on flexibility, and it helped — for the problems flexibility solves: commute, rigid hours, being chained to a desk. But flexibility makes a quiet assumption: that the "life" side of the equation is a fixed amount of personal time the employee just needs more control over.

For a working caregiver, that assumption breaks. The "life" side isn't leisure being squeezed; it's an unpaid administrative job that grows independently of how flexible the schedule is. Give that person total scheduling freedom and the job is still there, still landing during business hours, still uncapped. Flexibility changes when the work happens. It doesn't change whether the employee has to do it.

The PTO day that isn't rest

There's a specific pattern worth watching for in your best people: they take the day, but it isn't a day off. It's a day to sit on hold with a records department, drive a parent to a specialist, wait for a callback that defines the rest of the week. They come back more depleted than before.

This is why "unlimited PTO" can coexist with a visibly exhausted senior team. The benefit assumes time is the scarce resource. For a working caregiver, time isn't scarce — recovery is, because the time keeps getting consumed by work that can only happen during business hours. More days don't change what the existing days get used for.

Why this concentrates in your 40s and 50s — and why it's a retention risk

Employees in their 40s and 50s are typically your highest-leverage people: deep institutional knowledge, leadership scope, the hardest work to replace. They're also squarely in the peak caregiving window. So the people your retention strategy cares about most are the people most exposed to a pressure it usually ignores.

Standard retention levers — comp, title, development — assume the threat is inside work: a competitor offer, a stalled career. For a senior caregiver, the threat is outside work: the role has quietly become incompatible with the load at home, and no raise fixes incompatibility. The result shows up as quiet attrition, reduced hours, and declined promotions. And the cost of an unsupported caregiver is real: University of Pennsylvania researchers estimate that a mid-career daughter caring for an aging mother absorbs roughly $80,000–$100,000 a year in lost earnings, advancement, and quality of life.⁴ When that person leaves, the exit interview almost never names the parent.

Translated into business terms, that load shows up on the P&L in three places — the coefficients behind our cost calculator:

Put your own headcount, salary, and industry behind these — run the cost calculator →

What actually helps: remove the second job

Re-motivating an overloaded person misses — they're already motivated and out of bandwidth. The lever that returns a senior employee's capacity is taking the administrative care work off them.

And no, the answer usually isn't "they can just hire help." A senior leader can typically afford to pay for the hands-on care — an aide, a home-care agency — and often already has. That's not the lever, because paying for help creates a new job: vetting and managing the aides, covering the no-show, rebooking the visit that moved, and taking the calls when the plan changes. Money buys the service, not the person who runs it⁶ — and unlike at the office, your employee has no assistant for this one. Trying to help a parent stay at home only adds to that coordination. Removing it is the part that gives their capacity back.

That's the role of a Care Continuity Partner: a real person, working remotely and at the family's direction, who handles the administrative side of an aging parent's care — keeping records organized and current, requesting what's missing, scheduling and confirming appointments, following up on the open items, and sending the family written updates so everyone works from the same picture. It is non-clinical and family-directed; it doesn't diagnose, treat, monitor, or decide. It removes the logistics — the part eating your employee's Tuesday and their evenings.

Offered as a benefit — funded, co-funded, or available at a preferred rate — it reaches your key people before the imbalance turns into a resignation. It's worth being precise about what it is not: it isn't another resource to manage (the kind that sits at low utilization), and it isn't the EAP, which counsels the employee but doesn't do the coordination. It removes work, which is why people use it.

A simple plan

1. Open the door, without prying. "It seems like a heavier stretch lately — you don't owe me details. If something at home is taking a lot of coordination, there may be a way the company can help with that." You're signaling safety, not requesting a diagnosis.
2. Quantify the stakes. Run the employer caregiving cost calculator with your headcount and industry. One regretted senior exit usually dwarfs the cost of helping.
3. Offer to remove the work, not just grant time. A coordination benefit that takes the administrative load off the employee is the lever the others aren't. Check whether your stack has it with the caregiver-benefits gap checklist.

Re-engagement follows relief. When the second job comes off their plate, the senior employee you were worried about usually comes back to the work.

Related reading

The employee side of this load is mapped in depth in our family guides — useful background for what your people are actually carrying:

• The hidden administrative burden of caregiving — where the ~27 hours a week go.
• Long-distance caregiving — coordinating a parent's care from another city.
• EAP vs caregiving benefits — why the EAP counsels but doesn't do the coordination.
• Why Averyn — how the coordination benefit works for employers.

Sources

1. Geri Stengel, Caregiving Doesn't Show Up On A Claim Line. That's Costing Companies And Employees, Forbes (Apr 28, 2026). forbes.com.
2. AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the U.S. 2025. aarp.org.
3. SHRM, 2026 Top Five Workplace Issues. shrm.org.
4. Penn LDI (University of Pennsylvania), America's Caregiver Crisis is Burning Out Millions of Families (May 28, 2026) — cost estimate per Norma Coe. ldi.upenn.edu.
5. SHRM, working-caregivers research. shrm.org.
6. Stephanie H. Murray, Americans Are in Denial About Elder Care, The Atlantic (Jun 23, 2026). theatlantic.com.

Non-clinical note: AverynCare provides family-directed administrative coordination. We do not provide medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or emergency monitoring.

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