Easing the load: The caregiver-friendly workplace is emerging | Canada Voices

To Cynthia Iorio, caregiving feels like running into a burning building: Not everyone has the mettle for it.

She was 34 when her mother got the diagnosis. Bladder cancer had spread to the liver, lungs, bones and brain. Ms. Iorio felt it was her responsibility – her privilege – to be by her mom’s side until the end.

The question was how. How would she pour herself into caregiving while working a demanding job, managing an aircraft development project?

In the beginning, Ms. Iorio would sit at her mother’s bedside in a Montreal hospital, co-ordinating various engineering groups by phone. Ms. Iorio’s role grew even more intense after her mom was sent home.

“I was the chauffeur. I was liaising between all the paid and community resources and family, administering her medications and communicating with her financial advisers and accountant,” she said.

“It became an extremely isolating, lonely, overwhelming experience. At one point I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, what is happening to my life?”

Seeing that she was unravelling, her boss urged her to consider an unpaid leave plan for caregivers from the Quebec government, which guaranteed an equal position when she was ready to return.

The time off was critical. For three months, she stayed overnight with her mother in hospital, calming the ailing woman when anxious delirium took over. In the spring of 2016, her mother died in a hospice. Ms. Iorio returned to work three months later, to supportive colleagues.

“Caregiving demands time,” she said. “It demands us to take on someone else’s entire life, not just their health care responsibilities, in a fast-paced world.”

She continued: “It’s instrumental that employers provide the permission, language and acknowledgment that we’re all dealing with this.”

One in four Canadians cares for a family member or friend with a long-term health condition, physical or mental disability, or problems related to aging, Statistics Canada reports. But while parental leaves and benefits are well-established norms, most employees caring for people at the other end of life do so without help. There remains an unspoken expectation that this kind of care should be handled in private.

Some employers are beginning to recognize the impossible bind their working carers find themselves in, pulled between full-time hours and family duties. A new kind of “caregiver-friendly” workplace is emerging, where these responsibilities aren’t hidden and policies are tailored to help ease the load. They include flexible work arrangements, paid and unpaid leaves, benefits offering respite care, specialized counselling, peer support groups, online resource portals and job protection.

“It’s starting to shift because more and more people now have personal lived experience with this,” said Christa Haanstra, who leads a working caregiver initiative at the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence. “This population is just going to grow.”

While births have fallen steadily – 2024 saw fertility rates hit a record low – our population is getting older, and more dependent. Nearly a quarter of people in this country will be older than 65 by 2043, with those over age 85 tripling by 2068, according to projections from Statistics Canada.

“The rates of caregivers are going to outpace the rates of new parents in your organization,” Ms. Haanstra said.

About 6.1 million employees – 35 per cent of the labour force – are juggling caregiving, according to the CCCE, which was launched in 2022 by the Azrieli Foundation to support uncompensated carers and paid care providers. Those putting in full-time hours at work spend an average of 4.5 extra hours a day helping family members, according to the organization’s 2023 survey of 3,000 people.

It’s an intensive second shift loaded with physical, emotional and logistical pressures. Nearly half of caregivers feel chronically anxious or worried, and 37 per cent are completely overwhelmed, the survey found. At work, burned out caregivers are more likely to be late, miss shifts, pass up promotions, quit, or retire early.

Researchers warn that companies failing to address this cohort will face steep losses in productivity and retention. On the other hand, caregivers who get support at work report more trust, loyalty and job satisfaction, which boosts retention.

“We know that the people who are caregiving are the ones in the family who are high performing – the ones you rely on. The people pulling their weight caregiving are the ones who are going to pull their weight at work,” said Ms. Haanstra, who led a series of national round tables with Canadian employers aiding these workers.

“You have to support them because otherwise you’re going to lose them. It’s crazy to me that more employers don’t see that.”

What sets caregiving-friendly employers apart is a fundamental shift in their workplace culture, according to a deep well of research from Hamilton’s McMaster University. Instead of treating employees’ care responsibilities as a personal problem to solve after hours, managers are aware and respond.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, for instance, Sun Life decided to replace its emergency days with five paid “care days.” Since 2023, employees have been able to use them whole or in hourly increments for caregiving, family emergencies or their own health needs.

Last spring, the financial services company went further, overhauling its benefits program so that employees can repurpose their leftover annual credits to fund whatever they need most, including eldercare. Staff can also arrange alternative schedules, clocking in and out around​ their relatives’ medical appointments.

“We hear from people that if it weren’t for flexibility and some of these programs, they would need to leave the workforce because they’d need to make a choice,” said Nicole Montpetit, Sun Life’s vice-president of Total Rewards in Canada.

Flexibility was a salvation for Terrence Ho, who found himself responsible for three people at the peak of COVID-19.

In 2016, Mr. Ho was co-ordinating all the care for his younger brother, Torrance, who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, while his mother, Mimi, and her partner handled the man’s daily needs.

Three years later, Mimi was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Mr. Ho began helming the care for her and his brother. At the same time, his brother’s former support worker was diagnosed with dementia. She had no family in the country, so Mr. Ho looked after her too, getting her into long-term care.

Managing the chaos, Mr. Ho began suffering panic attacks and would take himself to the ER.

Throughout the crisis, he was working in sales for assistive technologies, which help aging and disabled people. He was transparent with his managers, who responded by giving him a high degree of flexibility.

“To hear from my employer, ‘We got your back, you take care of your family,’ that was one less weight on my shoulders. It made such a difference to my well-being. I didn’t crash and burn and could take care of the things I needed to take care of,” Mr. Ho said. “It made me very loyal to the company, because I saw that they had my back.”

Mr. Ho’s mother died in 2021; his brother passed three years later. Looking back on those devastating years, Mr. Ho feels change in the workplace will come from leaders who’ve gone through these experiences with their own families.

“They’re the ones who are more compassionate about supporting their teams. That’s what it may take. But it will require these leaders to be willing to speak up.”

A constellation of factors is intensifying the caregiving crisis in Canada.

Our population is aging. With medicine advancing, more people are living longer with chronic illnesses. This means the care years are lengthening: The average caregiver in Canada has been providing care for 4.6 years, according to the CCCE.

Since the pandemic, many Canadians have grown reticent about going into long-term care homes, where capacity is already limited. Growing old at home is no less daunting, as a shortage of personal support workers deepens in this country.

That leaves much of the load on families, which are smaller than they were in previous generations. Where three or four siblings might have split care duties in the past, now it often comes down to a single child, or two siblings who live far apart.

And the caregiving crunch just got tighter. Pandemic-era flexibility was a boon for carers, who could keep an eye on family members and drive them to medical appointments while working from home. Now, as more bosses ask their employees to commute in five days a week, return-to-office mandates are taxing carers in ways they thought were behind them.

All of it collides with the gruelling nature of caregiving. Needs are dire but also unpredictable, catching families off-guard. For relatives living with chronic illness and disability, care can be long-term. With the dying, care intensifies and then ends abruptly.

This kind of love for family leaves people uniquely isolated. Being off work to care for a frail relative is often a desperate experience that families live through in private.

By contrast, when expectant parents head off for their leaves, the mood at the office is public and celebratory – cakes, send-offs and birthing room photos broadcast in all-staff emails. While parental leaves might be exhausting, this is a joyful time.

“Raising children, there are constant wins. They’re growing, evolving, there’s a future ahead of them,” Ms. Haanstra said. “When you are doing eldercare, it’s a very heavy time mostly focused on decline. Often, the end point is someone’s passing. It’s a very different emotional burden.”

For years, Carla Velastegui, 31, has cared for her mother, Gina Chamorro, who lives with young-onset Parkinson’s disease. After the family emigrated from Colombia, Ms. Velastegui would set up medical appointments, drive her mother to specialists and translate, duties that began while she was in highj school.

By 2018, Ms. Velastegui was working full-time in health care technology. Her mother’s needs had advanced. She remembers taking a client call while in hospital, trying to carry on as if nothing was wrong while nurses came in and out and medical equipment sounded in the background.

“It was a quiet realization that stayed with me that this was not sustainable, that caregiving could not be treated as something happening at the margins of my life, or as something I could pretend was not part of my reality.”

Still, Ms. Velastegui was just starting out in her career and hesitant to reveal this responsibility to her managers.

“I had a fear of repercussions. You don’t want to share any problems you may have,” she said. “I also often thought, there’s nothing the employer can do to help me, so what’s the point of me sharing?”

Caregiving has since morphed into a full-time job. At the family’s home in the Halton region, Ms. Velastegui splits duties with her sister and father.

“I’m helping my mom get up in the morning; getting her medication; helping sometimes with showering, dressing and mobility; preparing her meals; driving her to appointments; translating, advocating and following up with exams and specialists; connecting information across all the different providers; handling finances; managing legal affairs; training home support staff and providing emotional support.”

After years of trying to balance caregiving with her own life, Ms. Velastegui burned out. In December 2024, she decided she needed to step away from full-time work.

“Six per cent of caregivers leave the workforce entirely because they feel that they can’t do it any more. I became part of that six per cent,” she said.

Today, she applies her personal experience to her work, consulting for tech start-ups, hospitals, healthcare and government agencies to better integrate patients and their carers into research and policy.

Ms. Velastegui thinks many existing workplace programs available to new parents can be adapted for employees tending to older or sick adults. She points to leaves, re-entry programs and insurance benefits that employees can share with their kids. What about young carers like herself, whose dependent is an adult?

“I hope to return to full-time work when caregiver-friendly workplaces are more of a norm,” she said, “not something you stumble through by luck, by trial and error.”

Slowly, more employers are coming to realize working carers need time and reprieve as they struggle to focus on the job and at home.

The juggle is especially punishing for employees who care for clients professionally in their day jobs, and then come home to aging and ill relatives who also need help.

At SE Health, a non-profit organization providing nurses and personal support workers, 55 per cent of the workforce consists of such “double-duty” caregivers.

To alleviate burnout, the organization partnered with GreenShield last spring to launch a benefit that gives employees caring for parents or grandparents some respite, with up to five visits from a certified PSW.

SE Health also offers carer-centric information sessions, online directories of resources and the services of a registered social worker who has personal experience balancing care and work.

Other companies are highlighting how transferable caregiving skills are to a paid working environment.

Since 2021, Engineers Yukon has been counting a portion of their engineers’ informal family caregiving hours toward their professional development.

One goal was to help more women enter and remain in the field, said Alison Anderson, a volunteer member with the territorial regulator’s 30 by 30 Committee, which is working toward women making up 30 per cent of newly licensed engineers by 2030.

“We wanted to remove a barrier to working caregivers staying in the profession, and to reduce stigma surrounding working caregivers,” Ms. Anderson said.

They argued that much like other activities recognized as professional development – volunteering, community work, coaching a team – caregiving also benefits engineering. In a joint report with Concordia University, Ms. Anderson found it helps develop skills related to communication, compromise, time management and conflict resolution – all relevant to the practice.

“These people are leaders in their homes and in their communities,” Ms. Anderson said, “and they’re bringing those skills to work.”

For Ms. Haanstra, the fundamental question for employers is this: What if recognizing and helping caregivers became as normal as supporting new parents at work?

“How do we think about the future of work so that family caregivers are not a burden?” she said.

“How do we think about organizing a workplace to be proactive, rather than constantly saying, ‘Oh no, now we have to fill this gap.’ It’s a very reactive situation now, where it’s constantly a crisis.”

In Montreal, Ms. Iorio has turned her lens to working carers, consulting with businesses to better account for the caregiving phenomenon in their workforce.

Six years after her mother died of cancer, Ms. Iorio was called back into caregiving service. Her father was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare neurodegenerative disorder, and given several months to live.

By then, Ms. Iorio was working at an IT firm. She was surprised to learn the company offered four paid weeks a year to employees caring for a family member with a serious health condition. There were family resource groups, even a “caregiving concierge.”

In the end, her father died just two weeks after his diagnosis. When Ms. Iorio returned to work a month and half later, managers and colleagues were compassionate, just as it was when her mother died.

“Life didn’t turn out the way I expected,” she said, “but it was a human experience for me to be able to give back to my parents what they had given to me, at the end of their lives.”