There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to be in two places at once. Not literally, perhaps, but the effect is much the same: half your attention on the school run, the ageing parent's hospital appointment, or the childminder who's just cancelled, while the other half tries to hold together a full-time job.
For millions of working adults across the UK, this isn't an occasional squeeze. It's a permanent state of affairs.
Recent research from Deloitte and YouGov found that 57% of working parents in the UK feel mentally exhausted or burnt out, while 53% report increased stress or anxiety linked to balancing responsibilities at home and at work. Women appear to bear a disproportionate share of this burden, with 64% saying they feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities, compared with 38% of men.
These aren't just numbers on a page. They represent employees showing up to your Monday morning meeting, having already negotiated a school uniform crisis, a delayed train, and a medical appointment they forgot. They represent the quiet guilt of leaving work early for a parents' evening, or the harder guilt of missing it altogether because a deadline couldn't move.
Why This Isn't Just a "Parents'" Problem
It's tempting to file this under employee benefits for mums and dads and move on. But the pressures of combining work with caring responsibilities extend far beyond parenthood alone. Many of your employees are caring for elderly parents, partners with long-term conditions, or siblings with additional needs, often while raising their own children. The so-called "sandwich generation," caught between caring for children and ageing parents simultaneously, is growing, and their mental health tends to suffer accordingly. (More than one in four sandwich carers report symptoms of mental ill-health, 2019)
Nor is this confined to any one type of role. Senior leaders juggling school pick-ups around board meetings face it just as much as shift workers trying to arrange childcare around unpredictable rotas, sometimes more acutely, given the expectation that seniority means constant availability. (Acas framework for positive mental health at work, 2020)
The Business Case for Paying Attention
Employers who see this purely as a personal matter, something for staff to sort out in their own time, are missing both the human and the commercial picture. When employees are stretched between work and caring duties, the effects show up at work too: increased absence, reduced concentration, higher staff turnover, and a slow erosion of goodwill towards the organisation. (Li & Wang, 2022, pp. 407-414)
Working Families’ research suggests that support for family life remains uneven: 47% of parents said financial concerns stopped them from taking as much time as they wanted with their baby, and 46% said they found it hard to maintain boundaries between work and home life. This points to a continuing gap between what many employees need and what they feel they receive from their employers. For organisations, visible family-friendly support can be an important factor in retaining talent and remaining competitive in attracting and promoting staff.
What Genuine Support Looks Like
The good news is that meaningful support doesn't have to mean an overhaul of your entire HR policy overnight. It starts with recognising a few home truths about how caring responsibilities actually affect people at work.
First, flexibility needs to be real, not performative. Offering "flexible working" on paper while quietly expecting people to be reachable at all hours undermines the whole point. If a member of staff needs to start later to manage a school run, or leave promptly to collect a child, that arrangement only works if managers protect it rather than treating it as a favour to be repaid.
Second, managers need the confidence to have these conversations well before a crisis hits. Many line managers simply don't know how to respond when an employee mentions they're struggling to cope with caring responsibilities. They might worry about saying the wrong thing, so they say nothing at all, leaving the employee to manage alone. Training managers to recognise the signs of overload and to respond with practical curiosity rather than awkward silence changes this dynamic considerably.
Third, organisations should look honestly at their own culture around presenteeism. Do people feel safe leaving on time to pick up a child, or does the office subtly reward those who stay late, regardless of what's waiting for them at home? Cultures that quietly punish boundary-setting will always struggle to retain people with caring responsibilities, however generous the policies look on paper.
Finally, it helps to remember that caring responsibilities ebb and flow. A colleague managing a newborn's sleep schedule has different needs from someone supporting a parent through a dementia diagnosis, and both are different again from someone coordinating childcare during half term. Rigid, one-size-fits-all policies rarely serve anyone well. What tends to work better is a genuine willingness to have a conversation and adjust where possible.
Small Shifts, Real Difference
None of this requires grand gestures. Sometimes it's as simple as a manager asking, "How are you managing everything at the moment?" and actually listening to the answer. Sometimes it's building in a buffer around school holiday periods, or normalising conversations about caring responsibilities in the same way we've slowly normalised conversations about mental health more broadly.
What matters most is consistency. Employees notice whether support is real or whether it evaporates the moment things get busy. Getting this right isn't only about compassion, though that matters in its own right. It's also about building a workforce that can sustain itself through the inevitable pressures of ordinary life, rather than burning out under the weight of trying to do everything at once.
Ready to help your people manage the pressures of work and home life?
At Mental Health in Business, we help organisations build the confidence, knowledge and practical support structures that make a genuine difference to employees juggling work and family commitments. From manager training that equips your leaders to have these conversations well, to workshops and webinars covering the pressures of caring responsibilities, we tailor our approach to what your organisation actually needs.
To find out more about how we can support your team, get in touch at info@mhib.co.uk or visit mhib.co.uk to explore our full range of services.
