I've been working with a company that's growing fast. New markets, new hires, promotions happening left and right. One of their leaders had been carrying a big piece of that growth, the person responsible for getting new locations open and running in state after state.

She was in a staff meeting when her phone rang. She stepped out to take it. A police officer was calling to tell her that her mother had been found alone in a grocery store parking lot, in her nightgown.

She came back into the meeting a few minutes later, and the meeting kept going.

That is what hidden turnover looks like at the beginning. Hidden turnover is the slow loss of an experienced employee to caregiving demands their employer never sees coming, and it almost never announces itself. From where her colleagues sat, nothing had happened. Someone left to take a call and came back.

How common is this, really?

More common than most HR teams assume. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving's Caregiving in the US 2025 report found that 63 million Americans, close to one in four adults, provided ongoing care to an adult or a child with a serious condition or disability in the past year, an increase of 20 million since 2015. Seventy percent of caregivers under 65 are working, and half of them say caregiving is affecting their work.

Run that against your headcount. In a 200-person company, you're looking at somewhere near 50 people doing a second job you've never discussed, and roughly half of them already feeling it collide with the first one.

They're not going to raise their hands. That's the part employers keep getting wrong.

Why don't managers catch it?

Because nobody has ever taught them what to look for, and because before an employee says anything out loud, the only evidence is behavioral.

We've been talking about emotional intelligence in the workplace for two decades, mostly as a leadership virtue. This is the practical application nobody built the training around. The signal is small and it is specific: someone leaves an energized meeting to take a call, and comes back a notch lower than when they left. The voice is flatter. The laugh arrives a beat late. The energy they walked out with is not the energy they walked back in with.

That gap is the earliest detectable signal there is. It shows up months before the missed deadline, before the pattern of Friday sick days, before the resignation nobody predicted. And it's gone in about ninety seconds, which is why untrained managers walk past it every single time.

What should a manager do in that moment?

Pull the person aside privately, that day, and ask what happened. Not in front of the team, not folded into a group check-in. One direct question, asked once.

On a close team, they'll usually tell you. News like that doesn't stay contained. And when they do, the job is not to fix it. The job is to say out loud that this is very likely the first hard moment and not the only one, and that you want to figure out how work bends around it rather than watching her carry both jobs alone while pretending she isn't.

That sentence matters more than anything else here. When an employee stays quiet about a parent's decline, it's almost never because it's private. It's because she's afraid you'll decide she can't handle the thing she just got promoted to do.

What should a manager not do?

Two things, and they're opposite errors.

1. Silence. The manager notices, decides it's personal, and says nothing, which the employee reads as confirmation that this doesn't belong at work.

2. Rescue. The manager tries to solve it personally, rearranging schedules on the spot, offering to handle logistics, playing case manager for a situation nobody trained them to manage. That one comes from a good place and it fails anyway, because it puts an untrained manager in the middle of medical, legal, and financial decisions that are not theirs to make.

The job is smaller and far more useful than either. Notice. Ask once. Believe what you're told. Then route rather than rescue, pointing toward the EAP, the resource, the outside expert whose actual job this is. A manager isn't a case manager. A manager is the person who makes sure an employee doesn't spend six months carrying it in silence before anyone at the company understands why her work changed.

Why this belongs in a Labor Day conversation

Today is built for the labor we can see. The shift, the timecard, the résumé line, the promotion announcement.

There's no holiday for the other shift. The one that starts when the visible one ends, with no start date, no announcement, no leave plan, and no end in sight. We throw a shower when a baby is coming. We have never built a single ritual for the person whose mother stopped recognizing her last month.

She went to the store opening. She got the location running. Her company still doesn't know what almost didn't happen, and it never will, unless somebody in that room learns what to watch for.

Your managers are already standing next to the people doing this work. Most of them just don't know they're supposed to be looking.

If you want to see what this is already costing you in the people you haven't lost yet, run the numbers: Run the Hidden Turnover Calculator

Onward, Jaime

Jaime Roberts is the founder of The Help Project, where she helps employers turn eldercare from a hidden retention risk into a solved problem. She has spent more than 20 years in aging services, starting in direct care.