Who Looks After HR?

7 min read · Work · HR

You are the person everyone comes to. The one who sat with someone in a meeting room while they cried about their marriage, then went straight into a headcount review. The one who ran the layoffs and also ran the wellbeing week. The one who knows which manager is the problem, and cannot say so.

Nobody has asked how you are doing. And if somebody did, you would say fine, because that is the job.

HR teams absorb a large volume of other people's distress without the supervision, referral routes or confidentiality protection clinicians get. Research links emotional labour, meaning managing feelings and holding composure through hard interactions, to higher stress, worse sleep and greater intention to leave.

Why Can't HR Use the Programme HR Runs?

Because you know exactly who sees what, and you know it because you set it up.

The largest recent survey on this asked employees why they do not use their employer's mental health support. Prudential Financial's Benefits and Beyond study, covering 2,946 full time employees and 750 employers in the United States and reported by WorldatWork, found that 55% of employees had never tried to use their available programme. Among those, 31% had a need for assistance and still did not use it. The barriers people named were fear of negative consequences at 40%, concerns about confidentiality at 38%, and worry about job security if they took mental health leave, also 38%.

Now apply all three to yourself. You are the one who receives the utilisation report. You know the vendor account manager by name. You have watched what happened to the last person who took extended leave, because you processed it. The confidentiality worry that keeps an engineer from booking a session is not a worry for you. It is knowledge.

This is why HR is structurally the least likely group in a company to use the company's own support, and why nobody notices. There is no line item for it. You are counted in the denominator and almost never in the numerator.

Is This Actually Emotional Labour, or Am I Just Tired?

It is emotional labour, and there is now research separating the two.

A study titled Beyond Workload, surveying over 2,000 public and private sector workers and reported in Human Resources Director, distinguishes emotional labour from mental labour. Mental labour is problem solving and concentration. Emotional labour is managing your own feelings, handling difficult interactions and keeping composure under pressure. They are not the same load, and the study found emotional labour was consistently linked to higher stress, poorer sleep, reduced balance between work and life, and greater intention to leave.

Read your last fortnight against that list. The termination conversation. The grievance. The person who disclosed something you were not trained to hold. The offsite where you were expected to be visibly cheerful. That is emotional labour, and there is a lot of it in your job description without ever being named there.

A therapist doing this volume of emotional work has supervision, a caseload cap and a professional body. You have a calendar and a laptop.

The comparison is not rhetorical. In clinical work, sitting with distress is understood to cost the person doing the sitting, so the profession builds in protection. In HR, the same activity is treated as a soft skill you either have or do not.

What Does the Research Say About Where This Goes?

Somewhere specific, and the order matters more than most people assume.

Shoji and colleagues ran two longitudinal studies, one with 135 behavioural and mental healthcare providers in the United States and one with 194 healthcare and human services workers in Poland, looking at burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Secondary traumatic stress is what happens to people who absorb other people's difficult material as part of the job. Their finding was consistent across both countries: burnout measured at the first time point predicted secondary traumatic stress six months later, while the reverse was not true.

Which suggests the exhaustion comes first, and the absorption of other people's distress lands harder on someone already depleted. Those studies were conducted with health and human services workers rather than HR teams, so this is a reasonable read across rather than a direct finding about your profession. Nobody has run it on HR, which is its own comment.

The practical implication is not complicated. If you are already running on empty in September, the difficult disclosure in November costs you more than the same conversation would have cost in March.

What Would Actually Help?

Four things, and the first two are not self care.

A route to support that does not pass through your own department. If you administer the programme, you need care outside it. That might mean a private therapist you pay for yourself, or a provision written into the contract that HR access is never reported at all, not even in aggregate. Ask your vendor whether they can do the second. Some can. Most have never been asked.

Somewhere to take the heavy conversations afterwards. Clinicians call this supervision. You do not need a formal version of it. You need one person, outside the reporting line, with whom you can say the actual thing that happened without it becoming a matter. A peer in HR at another company is often the most workable version.

A limit you name before you need it. Decide in advance what you will not hold. Notice, care, refer is the standard for managers, and it applies to you as much as to them. Hearing someone properly and handing them on well is the job. Becoming their therapist is not, and it will cost you both.

Permission to be a person who needs something. This is the one nobody in HR gives themselves, because the whole role is built on being the stable one. If the thought of booking a session feels like an admission, that feeling is worth noticing rather than arguing with.

We have written about how burnout builds and what recovery actually involves, and there is more on the clinical view of burnout recovery if you want the longer version. If you would rather keep it entirely away from work, you can see a therapist privately with no connection to your employer at all.

Is It Reasonable to Ask Your Company for This?

Yes, and you will probably find it easier to ask on someone else's behalf than your own, which is worth knowing about yourself.

The straightforward version is a line in your next vendor conversation. If the programme covers everyone, ask what provision exists for the people running it, and whether their use can be excluded from all reporting including the aggregate. When we set up an employee assistance programme we include never reported access for the HR team, because the people administering support are the group every programme forgets. Any provider should be able to do this. Ask yours.

And if you are reading this at 11pm having spent the day holding other people's difficulties, the honest thing to say is that this article cannot fix your workload. What it can do is name the thing you have been carrying without a word for it. Emotional labour is real work. It is not a personality trait you happen to have. It has a cost, the cost is measurable, and you have been paying it without anyone recording the expense.

Maybe start with the one conversation you have been avoiding. And maybe, just maybe, let it be about you.

What Else Do People Ask About HR Burnout?