Your Employees Are Not Struggling With Work. They Are Struggling at Work.
The difference matters. And most employee wellbeing programmes are not built for it.
There is a parent on your team right now who has not slept properly in three weeks.
The reason: something feels off with their teenager and they do not know what to do with it.
Or it could be an elderly parent with dementia. A painful divorce with no clean edges. Crippling financial pressure that does not let up between Monday and Friday. Or two of those things at once, or all three.
They have not said anything. They won’t say anything. They will show up, answer their emails, sit through their meetings, and carry it alone, the way people have always carried things that do not fit neatly into the structures around them.
You will not see it in their numbers. Not yet. You will see it in the quality of their attention. The slight flatness in a conversation that used to have more energy. The way they check their phone when they think no one is watching. The second half of the day that is quieter than the first.
Parenting stress, and the broader weight of life outside work is one of the most under-acknowledged drivers of presenteeism in the modern workplace. It does not show up cleanly in surveys. It does not trigger EAP referrals. It sits just below the threshold of formal concern, invisible to the programmes designed to catch it.
And it compounds.
A parent who is quietly worried about their teenager is a parent who is half-present. Half-present becomes disengaged. Disengaged becomes a performance conversation. A performance conversation becomes a resignation, a leave of absence, or a long slow exit that costs the organization far more than anyone wants to calculate.
The cost of replacing a mid-level employee sits between 50 and 200 percent of their annual salary. The cost of supporting them earlier is a fraction of that. Now multiply that number by the more than 40% of employees in your business who are navigating some version of this right now.
What most programmes miss
Employee wellbeing programmes have improved significantly in the last decade. Mental health days, EAP access, manager training, psychological safety frameworks. These things matter. They are not nothing.
But they are almost entirely individual in their frame.
They ask: how is the employee doing?
They do not ask: what is happening at home that is making it impossible for the employee to be fully here?
The data on this is not new. A 2023 report from the American Institute of Stress found that family and relationship stress consistently ranks among the top drivers of workplace distraction. Research from Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends has repeatedly flagged that employees are whole people, and that ignoring the whole person costs organizations measurably in retention, productivity, and engagement.
The gap is not awareness. Most HR leaders and people managers already know that what happens at home affects what happens at work.
The gap is infrastructure. There is no programme that meets someone in the specific, quiet, undramatic moment where they are noticing something is wrong but are not yet in crisis. Something built for the space before it becomes a formal problem.
I know this because I lived it
I wasn’t a disengaged employee. I was a founder. I worked for myself. And on most days during the hardest years, I am not sure you could qualify what I was doing as work.
My daughter Maddie was struggling. I was navigating a divorce that had no clean edges. Financial stress that did not let up. My own mental health was somewhere I did not want to look at too closely. I was not sleeping. The anxiety and depression were not occasional. They were the weather.
I would sit down to work and the day would be gone before I started. I was a parent watching his child disappear in front of him and had no idea how to stop it.
The only reason I did not get fired was that there was no one to fire me.
If I had been sitting in your office, you likely wouldn’t have known. I would have answered my emails. I would have been present enough to look present. And I would have been carrying something so heavy that I genuinely don’t know how I got through most days. Some days I did not want to.
After Maddie passed away in April 2015, everything I had been managing got exponentially worse. Grief does not arrive and then leave. It compounds everything that was already there.
I’m telling you because some version of this is happening right now on your team. I hope not the loss, but the weight. The parent who is up at 3am. The one whose kid has gone quiet in a way that feels different. The employee managing a parent with dementia while keeping everything together at work. The one sitting in your all-hands meeting who has not told anyone what is actually going on.
You have no idea who it is. That’s the nature of the thing. People don’t bring this to work. They carry it alongside work, quietly, for as long as they can.
The question is whether your organization is going to meet them before they can no longer carry it.
What earlier actually looks like
I have spent ten years in this space. I have had more than 2,000 conversations with parents who were somewhere between "this is probably nothing" and "I think something is actually wrong."
Most of the people I speak with aren’t in crisis. They’re in the quiet space before it. They are noticing things, changes in sleep, withdrawal from friends, a mood that has settled into something lower than it used to be. They don’t know whether what they’re seeing is serious or whether they’re overreacting. They do not know how to start a conversation without making it worse. And they have nowhere to take that uncertainty.
That is the moment The MentorWell was built for.
The tools, workshops, and community exist to meet people there. It’s before the family emergency becomes a workplace crisis. Before the parent who is half-present becomes the parent who is gone.
LifeLine Parent Workshops bring this directly into the workplace. Three sessions. Built around the questions more than 2,000 parents have asked. Designed to give working parents the tools to recognize what they are seeing, start the right conversations, and know where to go when professional support is needed.
It is structured, practical, early-stage support, delivered through the employer, for the person who has been carrying something quietly and needed somewhere to put it down.
What this means for the people who lead people
If you are an HR leader, a people and culture director, or a senior leader who takes whole-person wellbeing seriously, this is the gap I am asking you to look at.
Your people are already struggling with it. They’re just doing it alone, at their desks, in the second half of the day when they think no one is watching.
The question is not whether this is affecting your workforce. It is whether your organization has decided that’s something worth addressing before it becomes something else.
Earlier is always better.
If you want to understand what this looks like inside a workplace, I would like to talk.
Or start here: Manager Signal Check
Chris Coulter is the founder of The MentorWell, based in Toronto. He has spent ten years supporting parents of teenagers navigating mental health challenges — and the employers who want to support them earlier.
