HR is Tired Too
When you’re an HR professional, your job requires maintaining a delicate and often uncomfortable balance between being your employees’ advocate and the organization’s representative. You’re expected to enforce company policy while still being compassionate and empathetic to employees. It’s a tough spot to be in, and it can take its toll on you professionally and personally.HR is one of the few departments that are accountable to everyone in an organization, from low level employees to senior leadership.
Human Resources (HR) professionals around the world are burned out. In fact, they have been burned out for a very, very long time.HR professionals are dealing with a myriad of challenges: soaring employee burnout rates, hiring and retention troubles amid the Great Resignation.
HR was meant to administer employee policies, hire, fire and pay. But over the past three decades and particularly over the past ten to fifteen years HR has increasingly become the epicenter of corporate attention. HR, very much overnight, became the last frontier of business innovation and possibilities. The same thing that happened to IT in the 90s, to marketing and sales in the early 2000s, to finance in the late 2000s and beginning of the 2010s, has been happening to HR over the past few years: possibilities to transition from a “cost center” to a “revenue and value generating business function”. The HR function now has to be a blend of IT (HRIS), Finance (Payroll/Pay for performance), Legal (HR laws and employee relations), Marketing (employment branding), Sales (recruiting), PR (internal communications), Product Development (program and benefit offerings) and Leadership (coaching, etc).
There’s no such thing as a day in the life of HR. Each unique day brings with it equally harrowing, depressing, upsetting, and challenging aspects of seeing your best people in their worst possible moments. It’s easy to forget that HR are people too, as well as employees. We experience the same life challenges and work turbulence as non-HR colleagues. We care, and it’s our job to care, but the emotional rebound effect is great and it’s very hard to shake off all of this in an average day. Being a ‘professional carer’ in HR is emotionally exhausting and has an impact on all areas of your life, both work-related and personal. There’s no pause button on catastrophe when it strikes.
The unpleasant responsibility of dispensing bad news was given to the HR department. If you’ve ever let a person go, you’d know how awful it is for the recipient of the bad news—but it also takes a huge emotional toll on the person delivering the message. On top of that . solid HR work is rarely fully delivered or experienced through the HR person him- or herself. For programs, culture, coaching needs, and the millions of micro-decisions that impact the employee experience, the direct manager is often (or should be) the one communicating to the employee, addressing questions, or supporting the day-to-day needs of their team. Being dependent on others to deliver as expected, without the dreaded “HR told me we had to do it,” can be a leap of faith. And managing the employee whose manager blames the HR team for company policies, cutbacks, etc., can be emotionally exhausting.
It is also important to note that HR Serves as a “toxin handler” for the organization, Peter Frost, author of Toxic Emotions at Work, defines toxin handling as those who “voluntarily shoulders the sadness, frustration, bitterness, and anger that are endemic to organizational life. While effectiveness of HR department and managers is crucial for managing toxins within the company, provision of a proper environment for these toxin handlers is an absolute necessity to maintain their health and quality of life and further allow them to release their absorbed negative emotions at work.
HR can be a lonely role. Personally, one of my first mentors commented to me once as we headed out to lunch how unusual it was for her to have a friend at work. She had been in her position for 15 years. That’s 15 years of feeling like you couldn’t have a friend, had no one to confide in, no one to turn to when you feel down. It’s kind of like police work – it makes for difficult family or neighbourhood barbecue chit-chat. Everyone thinks that you want to collect information from them. So addressing the loneliness of HR teams is critical to their health.
The costs of compassion fatigue are real and can be debilitating. A person suffering from compassion fatigue may find it almost impossible to do their work. They may be curt and dismissive with colleagues or the public. They might make mistakes or become apathetic about their jobs. The most frustrating aspect about compassion fatigue is often that these employees don’t recognize these uncompassionate versions of themselves; they want to be empathetic, and know they should be, but they are physically and mentally too incapacitated to do so.
by Takudzwa Kufa (Human Resources and Business Development Specialist)