Burnout in HR | Who looks after HR

It’s the last quarter of 2026.

When people talk about burnout, we often imagine someone who has completely fallen apart or someone who can't get out of bed, can't work, or has reached a very obvious breaking point. But burnout in HR can be much quieter, sometimes it looks like opening your laptop in the morning and already feeling exhausted. It can look like sitting in yet another meeting about employee wellbeing while thinking, “I don't even know how I'm doing myself.” It can look like becoming emotionally detached from situations that would normally matter to you. It can look like answering emails at 9 pm because there's always "just one more thing", and sometimes, it looks like being really good at your job while quietly running on empty.

This is one of the strange realities of working in Human Resources. We spend so much of our time talking about people, supporting people and creating better experiences for people, yet we don't always create enough space to talk about the people doing the work. HR professionals are often the ones employees come to when they are struggling, when there is conflict, when a manager isn't listening, when someone is unhappy with their pay, when a colleague has passed away or when someone is facing a difficult situation at work. We are expected to listen, advise, mediate and find solutions, often while managing our own workload and personal lives in the background.

There is also something particularly difficult about being burned out in a profession that is supposed to understand burnout. Imagine spending your day talking to managers about employee wellbeing, helping employees access support and encouraging people to take their leave, only to realise that you haven't taken a proper break yourself in months. You know all the right advice. You know what healthy boundaries are supposed to look like. You know that people need rest. But knowing something intellectually doesn't always mean you have the capacity to practise it.

Then there is the pressure to be resilient.

Resilience has become one of those words we use constantly in the workplace. We want resilient leaders, resilient employees and resilient HR teams. But I think we need to be careful about how we use it. If someone is consistently overwhelmed because their workload is unrealistic, their team is understaffed and every problem is treated as an emergency, telling them to simply become more resilient doesn't address the real issue. Sometimes the problem isn't that the person isn't strong enough. Sometimes the environment is asking too much of them.

That is an important conversation for HR to have, especially as we approach the end of the year. We cannot continue building workplace cultures where wellbeing is something we promote in a policy document but don't experience in practice. If we genuinely believe that people perform better when they have support, reasonable workloads, time to recover and the ability to switch off, then those principles have to apply to HR as well.

Because HR professionals are people too.

We have families, responsibilities, financial pressures, career ambitions and difficult days. We have moments when we don't know the answer. We have days when we don't feel particularly motivated. We experience workplace politics, difficult leaders, unrealistic expectations and organisational change just like everyone else does. The fact that our job is to support other people doesn't mean we somehow become immune to the things we are helping them navigate. Maybe the conversation we need to have this quarter isn't only about how we finish the year strong. Maybe it's also about how we finish the year well. How are you really doing girl?

Not the professional answer. Not the “I'm fine” answer.

Real answers. Because sometimes the people who look after everyone else need someone to look after them too.

SHE’S in HR REAL WORK. REAL TALK.