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We often think of the workday as a set period of time - we start work in the early morning, finish work in the late afternoon, and then turn off once we're off the clock. But for so many people, the workday isn't just 9 to 5.
The workday includes a parent's medication schedule. A child's school soccer game that starts at 4:30. A specialist appointment that could only be booked at 2pm on a Tuesday an hour away. A partner who needs help getting up the stairs. A late-night text from a sibling about Mom. And then, often, back to the laptop once the house is finally quiet.
In partnership with the Women's Nonprofit Network, our team at YMCA WorkWell surveyed nearly 900 women and gender-diverse professionals across the nonprofit sector, and one statistic really jumped out at me: 61% of them are caregivers - people who provide direct care for someone who depends on them. That's 3 in 5 raising young children, supporting aging parents, caring for a partner or adult child with a disability, or showing up for a family member or friend who depends on them.
What does that mean? Caregiving isn’t a niche issue affecting a handful of your people. For most of the people holding our sector together, it’s the norm.
And the data shows that caregiving itself isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens when caregiving has nowhere to go but into the workday, without a structure to catch it.
Let's let the data do the talking.
Caregiving Doesn't Stay at Home
To understand the impact of caregiving, we asked hundreds of caregivers a simple question:
To what extent do your caregiving responsibilities affect your experience at work?
The answers were striking. Sixty-nine percent said caregiving has a clear effect on their work - and one in five (20%) said it affects their work significantly. Only 7% of caregivers said it had no effect at all.
We call this the "spillover ladder" - the step-by-step ways that caregiving responsibilities can spill over into the workday. And it's remarkable that far more often than not, caregiving has a real impact on someone's work.
Sit with that for a second. We talk a lot about work-life balance in our sector and how our work life is creeping into our home life - but we don't talk often enough about how we bring our home life into work too. For the majority of caregivers in our sector, a clear line between home and work simply does not exist. The mental load of coordinating care, the interrupted focus, ruminating on the challenge of the day, the appointments that don’t fit neatly into evenings and weekends - it travels with them into and throughout the workday whether we acknowledge it or not.
The question for leaders isn’t whether caregiving shows up at work - it will. It’s whether your organization is set up to absorb it - or whether your people are absorbing it alone.
The More It Spills Over, The More People Burn Out
Here’s where the story gets even clearer.
Caregiving responsibilities are having a clear impact on people's experiences at work, but just how tangible is this impact on their well-being? To answer this question, we asked respondents:
Burnout refers to chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. According to this definition, how often do you believe that you have experienced burnout from your work in the past three months?
When we compare the spillover ladder with how often people report burnout "Often" or "Extremely Often" at work, we see an undeniable and steady climb.
Every step up the spillover ladder, burnout climbs with it - and this is referring specifically to chronic stress at work. By the time caregiving is significantly affecting people's work experiences, half are burning out regularly - 1 in 2 - compared to 27% of employees who do not feel affected by their caregiving responsibilities.
This isn't just noise in the data. It tells a simple and statistically significant story: The more caregiving bleeds into work, the more likely someone is to be running on empty.
Digging Into The Details
There are so many forms of caregiving, all with their own challenges and responsibilities. Often times, the most interesting takeaways are in the details - and we wanted to know how different types of caregiving showed up in the data.
To provide a clean comparison, we isolated three different groups:
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Employees caring only for young children at home.
- Employees caring only for an aging parent, a partner, or an adult child with a disability or chronic condition at home.
- The Sandwich Generation caring for both children and adult dependents.
The differences were telling.
What is the story here?
Caring for children disrupts the workday the most. Seventy-seven percent of caregivers with children at home said that their caregiving responsibilities at least somewhat impact their experiences at work, and 1 in 4 said significantly. Interestingly, however, their burnout rate was the lowest of any caregiving group - 30%, essentially the same as people with no caregiving responsibilities at all.
Disability and elder care, on the other hand, turns that on its head. It is less likely to disrupt the workday - just over half said it affects their experiences at work, and only 9% significantly. But their burnout rate was the highest at 43%.
Interestingly, the caregiving that most visibly disrupts the workday isn't the caregiving that wears people down the most. It makes intuitive sense once you sit with it. Caring for a child is demanding, but it’s bounded and socially recognized. There’s parental leave. There are managers who nod knowingly at a daycare pickup. The disruption is loud, but the support exists.
Caring for an aging parent or a partner with a chronic illness is different. It’s often open-ended, emotionally heavy, and largely invisible at work. “Eldercare leave” is almost unheard of, and there’s no obvious moment for a manager to say “go, we’ve got you.” It doesn’t blow up someone’s calendar - it quietly erodes them, week after week, with no built-in off-ramp.
The Sandwich Generation, unfortunately, carries both of these challenges at once. Their work is disrupted at the same rate as the parent-only group - 78% said caregiving affects their experiences at work - while 42% report regular burnout, the same rate as the group caring only for adult dependents. In other words, they shoulder the workday disruption of raising children and the quiet, grinding toll of adult care, at the same time.
These caregivers are squeezed on both fronts simultaneously, with no slack in either direction. And importantly, this is a group that is only set to grow. As Canada's population ages — seniors are projected to make up nearly a quarter of the country by 2030 — more employees will find themselves caring for aging parents and their own children at the same time. Statistics Canada already counts roughly 1.8 million "sandwich" caregivers across the country, and that squeeze is only poised to tighten.
It all provides a timely reminder that caregiving is rarely just one thing, and we are doing a disservice to millions of Canadians every time we focus on only one type of care.
What This Means For Leaders
Caregiving is structural. You can’t legislate someone’s aging parent healthy, and you can’t add hours to their day. But the experience of being a caregiver at work is something leaders can shape every day. Here’s where to begin.
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Stop assuming caregiving only means parenting. When most of us picture a “working caregiver,” we picture a parent of young kids. But our data shows that genuine burdens also sit with people quietly caring for aging parents and partners - care that rarely gets named at work - and especially so for caregivers managing both. Broaden your language and your policies. “Caregiving responsibilities” is more inclusive than “childcare,” and the people doing the most invisible work will notice you see them.
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Build flexibility that fits real caregiving. Caregiving doesn’t happen on a 9-to-5 schedule. The single most practical thing you can offer is genuine control over when and where work happens - flexible hours, the ability to step away for an appointment without a guilt tax, and outcomes that matter more than hours logged. Flexibility is the closest thing we have to an off-ramp for spillover.
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Make it safe to say it out loud. A lot of caregivers - especially those caring for adults - never disclose what they’re carrying, because they worry it’ll cost them. Normalize it from the top. When leaders talk openly about their own caregiving, it gives everyone else permission to stop pretending the second shift doesn’t exist.
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Equip managers to respond well. A caregiver’s day-to-day experience is mostly defined by one person: their direct leader. Give managers the awareness to recognize the signs, the language to check in without prying, and the latitude to actually accommodate. A manager who says “go, we’ve got this” is doing real well-being work.
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Measure it, so you can act on it. You can’t support what you can’t see. Ask about caregiving in your own employee experience surveys. Track how it relates to burnout and turnover in your organization. The patterns in your data will tell you where to focus - and build the case for the policies that follow.
The Quick Takeaway
Caregiving is the norm, not the exception. Sixty-one percent of the professionals we surveyed are caregivers and the responsibilities don't stay at home - 69% say their caregiving responsibilities affect their experiences at work, and 1 in 5 say it does so significantly.
This has clear implications for employees' well-being too: The more caregiving bleeds into our work, the more likely we are to burn out. And while caring for children disrupts the workday the most, it's disability and elder care - care that is quieter and less supported - that is associated with the highest levels of burnout. The sandwich generation feels both at once - the disruption and the burnout - which is why they're the group to watch most closely.
The nonprofit sector runs on people who care for a living - and then often go home and care more.
That’s a quiet kind of heroism, and it’s also a quiet kind of risk. When the people holding our communities together are stretched thin by the people they hold together at home, and we never see it or name it, we risk burning out the very people our missions depend on.
The good news is that seeing it is the first step. We can’t erase caregiving - nor should we want to. But we can decide whether our people carry it alone or whether our organizations are built to carry some of it with them.
But here's the reality: As the Sandwich Generation continues to grow, we can't talk about the Future of Work without talking about the future of caregiving at work too.
Want to know how recognition, workload, and burnout are showing up in your organization? Our WorkWell Insights Reports give people leaders and executives the data they need to turn insights into action.
Learn more on our Insights Page or reach me directly at dave.whiteside@ytr.ymca.ca. We'd love to help.
