A few reports came out this year that I keep coming back to. They're about the sandwich generation, people raising children while also caring for aging parents, and the numbers are hard to look away from. Nearly two thirds of working women in this position describe themselves as at a breaking point. More than half have turned down a promotion, a raise, or a new role because of caregiving responsibilities. Close to half a million women left the US workforce last year, and unsupported caregiving is a big part of why.
There's also a cost line in there that should get any employer's attention. Employees at high risk of caregiving burnout are running healthcare costs around two thirds higher than their lower-risk colleagues. This isn't a soft, feel-good argument for wellness benefits anymore. It's a budget line.
I bring this up because most corporate wellness programs I see are still built for a version of the employee that doesn't quite exist, someone whose life outside the office is basically a rest period between shifts. A step challenge or a lunchtime yoga class assumes the hard part of someone's day happens at their desk. For a huge number of people right now, the hardest part of the day starts the moment they leave the office and walks into a second, unpaid job coordinating a parent's medications or a child's school pickup.
You cannot recover from a workday inside a program that only sees the workday. If someone is carrying a real caregiving load at home, fifteen minutes of stretching between meetings is not going to touch the thing that's actually draining them. That doesn't mean workplace wellness is pointless. It means it has to widen its definition of what it's actually supporting.
A wellness program that only accounts for the hours someone is at their desk is measuring the wrong shift. The caregiving hours before and after work are often the ones doing the real damage, and they're invisible to almost every benefit built around office life.
I'm not going to pretend a coaching program solves caregiving responsibilities themselves, that's not something movement or breathwork can fix. But recovery capacity is recovery capacity, wherever the depletion is coming from. Someone managing a parent's care and a child's schedule needs their nervous system regulation and their physical resilience just as much as, maybe more than, someone whose only stressor is deadlines. Building that capacity has to be part of how a company thinks about supporting the whole person, not just the one showing up to the 9am meeting.
If your wellness program hasn't asked what your employees are carrying outside the building, these numbers are a good reason to start asking.
