Your workforce has a problem HR doesn't have a name for yet.

Jaime Roberts | Elder Care Workforce Strategist | Author, The Third Rail | 20+ years inside aging services | Founder, The Help Project

You know something is off. You just don't know what to call it.

Your retention is harder than it was three years ago. Your mid-career people — the ones who carry institutional knowledge, mentor the newer hires, and actually run the place — are distracted, burning out, or quietly stepping back from leadership. Your engagement survey doesn't explain it. Your EAP utilization isn't moving. And every time you lose someone good, the exit interview tells you almost nothing useful.

Here's what nobody has told you: elder caregiving is the hidden driver behind a significant portion of workforce disruption in companies like yours. Employees in their 40s and 50s are simultaneously managing careers, kids, and aging parents — what researchers call the sandwich generation. Most of them have never said a word to HR. They don't want to be seen as liabilities. So they absorb it. They take the calls in the parking lot, lose sleep over care decisions they don't understand, miss work without ever explaining why, and eventually leave for somewhere slower, quieter, or easier.

You're not losing them to your competitors. You're losing them to an invisible second job they've been carrying alone.

The Help Project names the problem companies can't see — and gives you a framework to act on it.

This is not a wellness program. It's not another EAP add-on. It's not a lunch-and-learn about self-care.

The Help Project is a workforce strategy practice built specifically around elder caregiving as a business issue. We work with HR leaders, VPs of People, and CEOs who already know something is wrong and need a credible partner to help them see it clearly and respond to it strategically.

We start by naming what's invisible. Then we build the framework that keeps your best people from quietly falling apart on your watch.

Where companies usually start

The Hidden Turnover Workshop

A 90-minute session for your employees and leadership that names the elder caregiving crisis your organization hasn't identified — and gives everyone in the room a framework they didn't have walking in. Includes a pre-session intake call and a post-session debrief where you'll learn more about your own workforce than your last three engagement surveys combined.

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Deeper Engagement

For companies ready to move from awareness to action. We build a caregiver-ready workplace strategy tailored to your organization — your workforce profile, your existing benefits infrastructure, your retention pressure points. This is the consulting engagement that operationalizes what the workshop surfaces.

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Ongoing Employee Support

Monthly office hours and navigation support for employees actively managing elder care decisions. Your people get direct access to expertise that most families can't find, don't know to look for, or can't afford. You get a retention benefit that actually differentiates you.

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Not sure where to start? That's what the first conversation is for.

The numbers your workforce strategy is missing

73% of employees are caregivers in some capacity. Among your mid-career and senior workforce — the people with the most institutional knowledge and the highest replacement cost — that percentage is higher. Replacing a mid-career employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. By 2030, 10,000 Americans will turn 65 every single day.

Your most experienced employees are not stepping back because they've lost ambition. They are managing a second full-time job that no one at work knows exists, using a system — Medicare, home care agencies, memory care facilities, legal and financial planning — that was designed by and for people who do this professionally. They are not professionals. They are trying to figure it out between meetings.

The cost of that is landing on your balance sheet right now. The question is whether you'll name it before or after the next resignation you didn't see coming.

This work is built for a specific kind of organization

The companies that get the most from working with The Help Project share a few things in common. They have at least 50 employees. They're in professional services, education, finance, accounting, or tech. Their leadership already has a gut feeling that something is happening in the workforce that standard interventions haven't solved. And at least one person on the leadership team has personal proximity to elder caregiving — they've been through it, or someone close to them has — so they don't need to be convinced the problem is real.

If that's your organization, the only question left is whether you're ready to name it.

What this is not: a generic wellness vendor, a motivational speaker with a caregiving story, another benefits platform, or a program that makes employees feel temporarily better without changing anything structural. If you're looking for a box to check, this isn't it.

Why this work exists — and who's behind it

Over 25 years ago, Jaime Roberts was one of the youngest licensed nursing home administrators in Illinois. She went on to lead major senior living operations, then moved into statewide policy and association leadership as CEO of Arizona LeadingAge. She has been inside aging services since before most of her clients were thinking about their parents at all.

The Help Project didn't start with a business plan. It started when a close friend asked Jaime to manage both of her parents' simultaneous care crises. When it was over, the friend told Jaime she would have paid $50,000 for what Jaime had done. The problem wasn't that she couldn't afford help. The problem was that no one in her professional world — not her HR department, not her EAP, not Google — had a framework for that moment.

Jaime is an Elder Care Workforce Strategist, a Teepa Snow-certified dementia care specialist, the author of The Third Rail: A Difficult Conversation About Aging in America, and a nationally recognized voice on eldercare as a workforce issue. She brings cross-sector credibility that no other practitioner in this space holds: aging services operator, public policy leader, family navigation expert, and strategic workforce consultant — in one person.

She built The Help Project because she knew the market had no language for what she'd done her whole career. Now it does.

If you already know something is wrong, the next step is naming it.

Most HR leaders who reach out to The Help Project say some version of the same thing: "I had a feeling. I just didn't have a framework." That's what this first conversation is for.