Why HR Should Rethink Support for Employee Caregivers

As organizations intensify their focus on employee well-being, one critical segment of the workforce continues to operate largely unseen: employees quietly balancing work with caregiving responsibilities. The result is a hidden strain affecting engagement, retention, and organizational culture.

Yet caregiving also cultivates many of the very capabilities employers say they need most, including adaptability, empathy, resilience, and complex problem-solving.

In this conversation with SHRM, Melissa Llarena, the founder of Career Outcomes Matter, shares why invisible caregivers remain overlooked in the workplace, how caregiving pressures shape employee performance and mental health, and what organizations can do to create cultures where employees feel supported.

Llarena designs and facilitates conversations for corporate teams on working caregivers and mental health. She spent over a decade as a corporate professional before building a 14-year coaching practice serving over 200 executives.

Event: SHRM 2026

SHRM: Many organizations focus on working parents, but a broader group of employees are quietly caring for aging parents, ill partners, or family members with disabilities. Why do these “invisible caregivers” remain overlooked in workplace policies and conversations, and what are the consequences of that blind spot?

Llarena: The invisibility is partly cultural and partly rational. When someone announces a pregnancy, the room celebrates. But when a colleague is managing a parent’s cognitive decline, a sibling’s disability, or a partner’s serious illness, silence is the safer professional choice. Disclosing it risks being read as distracted or less committed.

Organizations create conditions where silence feels safer, while self-concealment is rational. The professionals I interviewed did not feel confident disclosing because they did not want their commitment questioned. More junior employees told me they feared getting into trouble. It was only as they grew in seniority that they noticed peers stepping out for personal appointments and understood the unspoken rule: you earn the right to be a whole person once you have already proven yourself professionally. That should not be a senior-level privilege.

As for consequences, first, you make decisions about people with incomplete information. What reads as disengagement may be a caregiver who simply needed a different kind of support. Second, you overlook one of the strongest skill sets in your workforce. Rutgers University Business School research found that caregiving skills cover 76% of workforce skills and achieve 100% overlap with the top three skills in demand across all occupations: adaptability, interpersonal communication, and detail orientation. Those are not entry-level skills. They are leadership skills. When caregivers stay invisible, so do those skills.

SHRM: From a mental health perspective, what unique stressors do employees in caregiving roles face compared to the general workforce, and how do those pressures show up in performance, engagement, and retention?

Llarena: A father and former consulting partner described his professional standard in five words: the show must go on. He was also a caregiver, and what he was describing was the cost of performing composure while holding something privately devastating.

It is 12:50 p.m. You have a Zoom in ten minutes. Your mother calls. She has dementia. She just wants to talk. You let her because this is what love looks like. You hang up and join the call and perform like nothing just happened. The show must go on.

The mental load caregivers carry does not clock out when the workday starts. It shows up as distraction, missed signals, feeling stuck on problems, and a gradual erosion of the presence that good work requires. Guardian Life’s 2025 research found that 41% of caregivers report low overall well-being, 32% more than non-caregivers. That gap follows people into every deliverable and every performance cycle.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 reports only 31% of U.S. workers are engaged, costing the economy $1.9 trillion in lost productivity annually. MetLife’s 2023 Employee Benefit Trends Study found managers are 1.5 times more likely to be caregivers than non-managers. The people leading your teams are the ones most quietly carrying this.

SHRM: What are some of the early warning signs that an employee may be struggling with caregiving responsibilities, and how should managers respond in a supportive but appropriate way?

Llarena: The employees most at risk are often the ones who have historically delivered. High performers are the least likely to ask for help and the most likely to absorb the cost in silence until something breaks.

I know this from both sides. At 17, as an intern at a financial services firm, I managed a parent’s serious mental health crisis at home while performing fully at work every day. Nobody asked. I would not have told them everything. But if a manager had said, “you seem somewhere else this week,” and then paused, I would have had a choice in that silence. The question does not have to be about the crisis. The framework I use with organizations has three steps. Notice: observe the change, not the cause. Name: speak to what you see, not what you assume. Wait: do not fix. Do not fill the silence.

Look for changes, not deficits. Measure a person against their own best work. A report that used to arrive with three supporting data points now has one. An email that was always precise now reads clipped. Someone who used to stay after team calls now leaves the moment they can. These are signals worth a quiet, private conversation.

When you raise it, point to the work, not the person. Not “Are you okay?” but “Curious, I noticed that on this report, you featured one case study when in the past you have provided more.” That additional support is what made the difference for clients. Ask “What was different about this project or its timing?” That question shifts weight onto the situation. Caregivers are already lifting a great deal. Design your questions to lift more for them.

If the work is still getting done, the most powerful thing a manager can do is let that person know they are seen.

Resource: Talent Management

SHRM: Caregiving is often framed as a burden, but it also builds resilience, empathy, and problem-solving skills. How can organizations better recognize and leverage these strengths in their talent strategies and leadership development?

Llarena: A former advertising executive adopted a child who requires an individualized education program. Navigating that system means researching what no one explained, building a case from nothing, and persuading people with authority to change course in windows between client deliverables. The drive that found the best specialist across three states is the same drive that makes her the most prepared person in the room when the professional stakes are high. Same skill. Different application. Entirely transferable.

The empathy piece is equally direct. A people leader I know had a daughter with an arm injury. Managing her recovery taught her not to assume what was within someone’s normal range. What looks like unwillingness is often just an undisclosed limitation or an unspoken gap in context. She applied that same instinct in her role leading a manufacturing team in a foreign country, workers with different cultural expectations and ways of working.

In the facilitated sessions I run for corporate teams, participants who engage most deeply with tools for managing competing demands are often caregivers who already understand the underlying discipline. They do not need to be convinced that focus is valuable. They need permission to bring that capability into the room.

The resilience and empathy caregiving builds are not side effects of a difficult season. They are leadership credentials most organizations have not yet learned to read.

SHRM: If an organization wants to move beyond surface-level benefits and truly support caregiver mental health, what are the most impactful changes it can make — culturally and structurally — to create a more inclusive and sustainable work environment?

Llarena: Most organizations have an employee assistance program. Many have caregiver leave policies. Fewer have built conditions where employees feel able to use either without it becoming part of their professional story. The benefit exists. The culture that makes it safe to access often does not.

According to AARP and S&P Global’s 2024 caregiving report, 71% of caregivers say workplace support could have prevented their employment disruption. That is a retention number, not a wellness one.

The most impactful changes are relational before structural. A nonprofit CEO I worked with needed a key employee onsite for a critical event, last minute. Before calling her, she phoned her own child’s summer camp, confirmed a spot, and offered it as a concrete solution. The employee said yes. The institutional knowledge stayed in the building. Not a policy. A person thinking two steps ahead of the ask.

The tools I design for facilitated conversations integrate into natural workflows. Examples include a three-breath anchor before a high-stakes client call, and a clarity practice at the moment of switching from caregiving to work.

For organizations navigating return-to-office mandates, concentrating in-person time without accounting for caregiving logistics is a retention problem. A proactive career conversation with any employee who has disclosed a caregiving responsibility costs nothing. The employees who leave quietly often could have stayed.