Your Workplace Wellness Program Works When Caregiving is Part of the Package
Millions quietly care for loved ones, not realizing they’re carrying the system too.
The alarm on Maria’s phone buzzed long before the sun came up. She lay still for a moment, listening for sounds down the hall—a thud, a door creaking open—signs that her father might already be awake and wandering. Relief washed over her in the silence. For now, he was still sleeping.
In the kitchen, she brewed coffee and set out his morning pills in a plastic cup, lining them up in the order the doctor had scribbled on a discharge sheet months ago. By the time her teenagers stumbled in, half-dressed and grumbling about school, Maria had already coaxed her father out of bed, changed his clothes, and persuaded him to eat a bowl of oatmeal he promptly forgot to finish.
By 9:00 a.m. she had to shift from caregiver to employee and was at her laptop, headset on, running a project meeting. But her eyes flicked constantly to the baby monitor she’d set up in her father’s room. When the aide canceled again, Maria rearranged her day, juggling clients with crises. She will tell you she works two full-time jobs. One pays the bills. The other keeps her father alive. Neither leaves her much room to breathe.
And while Maria doesn’t see this as “caregiving,” her employer feels it every day—in missed meetings, late-night catch-up sessions, and the slow erosion of bandwidth that even the most committed employees can’t hide for long.
Health and Care: A System Held Together by Love
The United States spends nearly $4.8 trillion a year on healthcare, almost one-fifth of GDP, and the 63 million caregivers like Maria provide over $600 billion a year in unpaid labor that helps hold that system together.
Costs keep climbing, driven by chronic illness, emergency visits, and the high price of long-term care. By 2034, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. The system is bracing for a tidal wave—a “silver tsunami”—of demand that could overwhelm its fragile foundations.
Families like Maria’s are already absorbing much of that load. They keep loved ones out of hospitals and nursing homes, doing work that would otherwise drive costs even higher. But the toll of caregiving is real, and it’s reaching a tipping point.
The Toll of Caregiving on Overall Wellness
By the end of most days, Maria’s back aches from lifting her father into bed. Her nights are broken by his wandering, and her mornings begin with the same anxious thought: Did I miss something yesterday? She worries about every pill, every appointment, every mood swing. The stress is constant, and so is the fear that one mistake could land him back in the hospital.
Maria’s story is not unusual. Nearly two-thirds of caregivers report emotional stress, and almost half say the effects are severe. It shows up in constant fatigue and anxiety about whether they’re “doing it right.”
Once, she noticed swelling in her father’s leg and insisted he be seen—it turned out to be a blood clot. Catching it early saved him a hospital stay, and maybe his life. Maria has learned the hard way that small things can spiral into emergencies. Multiply that by millions of caregivers like her, and the savings become staggering.
Finances add another layer of strain. Maria has dipped into her savings to pay for respite care. She’s cut back her retirement contributions, telling herself she’ll make it up later. Nationally, nearly half of caregivers say their households have suffered financially because of their role.
And work? That’s another battleground. Maria has turned down promotions, passed on projects, and quietly wondered if she’s falling behind her peers. Fewer than half of family caregivers ever tell their supervisors about their responsibilities at home. Silence becomes its own employee health tax: promotions passed over, flexibility never requested, burnout suffered alone.
Why Caregiver Support Must Be Part of Workplace Wellness
More than anything, Maria wishes she didn’t feel so alone. She craves a circle of people who understand the exhaustion, the fear, and the fierce love that comes with caregiving. That longing is why the response cannot fall on her shoulders alone.
Nearly one in four employees today is juggling a caregiving role alongside their job—and that number is only expected to rise as our population ages and care needs grow.
It impacts women and employees of color the hardest—they’re disproportionately the ones reducing hours, stepping back from careers, or leaving the workforce altogether to manage care. When caregiving support is absent, it functions like a quiet DEI reversal—pushing out the very employees employers are working hardest to retain.
In a 2024 survey of over 1,200 full- and part-time employees of large employers (1,000+ employees), caregiving responsibilities were named as the driver for 75% of respondents who intended to leave their jobs within a year.
However, most wellness programs were built for the individual—exercise more, sleep better, eat well. But caregivers don’t lack awareness. They lack time, capacity, and support. A wellness strategy that ignores caregivers will always fall short.
When working caregivers are not acknowledged and supported, employee engagement quietly declines and morale suffers. Productivity slows. Their own health outcomes worsen because they don’t have time to care for their physical or mental health. As a result, caregiving has become a leading cause of employees leaving the workforce.
For employers, caregiving is no longer a personal issue—it’s a workforce stability issue.
Legacy caregiving solutions like backup care may offer a Band-Aid—a day of relief—but they also tend to focus on childcare needs. Meanwhile, caregiving for aging parents is a conversation that must be elevated in the workplace. In the same 2024 survey of working caregivers from S&P and AARP, 80% of those who have cared for both young children and aging parents believe there are more flexibilities given in childcare situations.
What caregivers need most is sustainable support, flexibility, paid leave, practical training, and above all, community. When employers create spaces for caregivers to find one another—whether through peer groups, ERGs, or broader internal networks—they ease isolation and remind people like Maria that they aren’t carrying this alone.
A Cross-Sector Responsibility
But it’s not just employers.
Providers must treat caregivers as part of the care team.
Health plans must fund supports that prevent more expensive care later.
State agencies and policymakers must enact the tax credits, stipends, and leave programs families need.
Communities must lift up caregiving as essential work, not invisible duty.
Caregivers who are supported and confident can prevent crises before they happen. They can keep loved ones at home longer, delaying costly nursing home care. When they receive respite and flexible work arrangements, their physical wellness allows them to keep providing care—sparing the system the costs of caregiver burnout.
And when they remain in the workforce, they keep contributing—not disappearing from payrolls and tax bases.
For too long, caregiving has been framed as a private matter. But when tens of millions of Americans are quietly doing work worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the private challenge becomes public. It is a workforce issue, a policy issue, and a healthcare cost issue all at once.
The Moment of Choice for a Healthy Workplace
Maria doesn’t call herself a caregiver. Neither do millions like her in a daily battle to balance healthy behavior with the selfless demands of work and caregiving. They call themselves daughters, sons, spouses, parents. They don’t realize that by caring for a loved one, they are carrying the weight of the healthcare system too—but they are.
If the last century was about building healthcare institutions, this one must be about strengthening the people who hold those institutions together.
Empowering caregivers is not charity. It’s a workforce strategy. It’s cost containment. It’s culture and retention.
References:
- S&P Global and AARP Caregiver Survey. (2024). Working While Caregiving: It’s Complicated.
