No HR for HR: The culture crisis about to reach boiling point! 

HR has always been a stressful profession, but it’s started to become apparent that there’s something more bubbling under the surface. More than half of HR professionals report being on the verge of quitting due to burnout. That’s a huge crisis that the function is facing, and the risk of massive knock-on problems for business as a whole is looming.

What’s the problem? How can we protect ourselves and our HR colleagues from it? And the overarching question: what comes next?

Where is this coming from?

According to a report from Gartner®, around 51% of HR leaders say they are receiving more requests for support, while only 9% of HR functions feel they’re aligned to their organisation’s needs. The world of work has changed significantly over the last decade, and so HR departments are often left to pick up the pieces and figure out the next steps. As Natalie Ellis, Founder and Director at Rebox HR noted in MHR 2024 World of Work guide, “It often feels like there is no HR for HR and it can be a lonely place… The emotional load presented by the role of HR is only likely to increase given the constant changes with employment law and increased employee expectations, sometimes the balance to please everyone is difficult to achieve.”

It makes sense. More and more organisational leaders are realising that the HR function has the potential to be a true strategic decision-maker, helping guide the strategy of the broader company. While it’s good that the value of HR is being recognised, evolving it beyond administration, this does mean that more and more work is falling onto HR team members, often without the resources to support them.

This can be especially problematic if the HR team must still deal with most of the more mundane, administrative tasks, and find themselves getting overwhelmed. If you’re having to navigate a difficult HR investigation or upskill a whole department in line with the future requirements of the business, but at the same time also need to manage everyone’s annual leave requests, that’s a recipe for frustration.

Emotional labour

HR often requires the suppression of emotions, especially as they deal with some of the most intense issues anyone in the workplace will see. Disciplinaries, terminations and performance management plans can all be very difficult for anyone to navigate emotionally, and HR professionals additionally have to shelve their feelings in order to put others at ease.

This is vital to stay professional, but it’s exhausting.

HR teams also tend to be the first hit by other employees’ frustration with the organisation at large. This can take a real toll on mental wellbeing. Likewise, HR are on the front line when it comes to employees’ personal issues outside of work. HR hear everything. If someone’s having health issues, family problems or struggling emotionally for any reason, a HR person will be dealing with it. Again, this can be emotionally tiring in the best circumstances, and at worst it can even be a painful reminder of their own experiences.

All of this can weigh very heavily on both individual HR employees and the team at large. This has a compounding effect. As the team has to put out more emotional labour, it gets harder and harder to break these harmful patterns. It gets gruelling, fast.

HR neglects itself

Because of the importance of HR departments, it can be incredibly easy for team members to be forced into bad habits to handle the demands of the role, leading to issues like not taking time off or recognising signs of stress in themselves. With one in five employees needing to take time off due to burnout, which can cost up to £1300 per employee, the need to act swiftly is key. The demands of the role are intense. They spend so much of their time encouraging this in other employees, they can end up neglecting themselves.

Remote and hybrid work has also caused some problems in this regard. While the flexibility to work at home or in an office can be incredible for wellbeing, it can also be isolating. This is particularly problematic for HR professionals, because it keeps them apart from their direct colleagues, the people who understand the unique, often emotional, difficulties that they face the most. Without that support network, problems can start to brew.

How can we fix it?

It’s clear why this is becoming more of an issue. Without some kind of change, we could find that the HR industry is hit with a wave of resignations and finds itself struggling to retain talent. But what can we do? What changes can we make as HR leaders and as teams to manage workloads and find our passion for our work again?

1.      Build a support network

Nobody understands the difficulties that HR professionals face like other HR professionals. Everyone needs to vent every now and then, and being able to do so with someone who gets it and doesn’t need you to explain the nuances of what’s causing you stress is priceless.

HR is often responsible for supporting team building in the wider business. Investing a little time to direct this internally to the HR team can really help forge stronger bonds. This is useful for any team, whether they’re in-office, remote or hybrid.

If you have a small team (many HR professionals work solo, especially in SMEs), or aren’t comfortable being very close with direct colleagues, reaching out externally is also an option. There are hundreds of groups on social media dedicated to helping HR professionals get validation, support and guidance. Direct other team members to these resources.

2.      Show your team how to set boundaries

While more and more responsibilities are being given to HR, your team do still need to make sure they’re taking time for themselves.

This needs to start from a top-down perspective. If you’re a head of HR or manager, and you neglect your own wellbeing or avoid taking your full annual leave allowance because you’re too busy, then your employees will model that behaviour. To build healthy habits within the department, there needs to be a culture shift.

This also extends outside of the HR team. Many managers rely on HR heavily to solve problems that fall more within their responsibilities. For example, if an employee isn’t performing as expected, it’s not HRs responsibility to improve it. Providing more educational resources for managers and coaching them to solve some problems within their own team instead of heading to HR first can take a lot of the mental load off.

As an example of this, many companies now train mental health first aiders, but often only HR team members are given that training. Extending this out to other departments ensures HR aren’t the only ones dealing with this.

3.       Embrace technology

Digital transformation is becoming a core part of many business functions, but HR often gets neglected. Two huge contributors to the high workloads of HR departments are:

• Mundane, day-to-day HR tasks. This can include things like managing and approving annual leave requests, changing employee data on the system, or answering pay inquiries
• Lacking metrics and reporting, making it much harder to present findings to the broader company and demonstrate value

Good HR software will enable things like employee self-service or chatbots, which frees up a huge amount of time, as employees can have more agency over their own data. It can also automate a huge range of other key task, provide a clear centralised location for people data, and even ensure many functions, like talent management, recruitment, onboarding and workforce management are made more accessible.

This can help with a lot of the resourcing problems that HR teams are facing, freeing them up to work on more high-level tasks. That means less stress, and more fulfilling work.

If you’d like to learn more about how MHR can help you redefine your HR team and beat burnout, download our latest guide to mental health in the workplace.