HR professionals suffer from higher burnout and turnover rates than professionals in other fields—an ironic predicament, given HR is tasked with managing employee retention and navigating the workforce away from burnout.
Yet, despite all the resources available to HR teams to reduce attrition rates, HR professionals had the highest turnover rate for any job function worldwide—15%, compared to the overall average of 11%, according to global data LinkedIn collected from its database over 12 months ending in June 2022.
Burnout among HR professionals does not look any better. According to a Workvivo report, 98% of HR professionals felt burnout over six months. A 2023 study by Gartner highlighted the role the pandemic may have played in driving up burnout among HR professionals: More than half say they are receiving more requests for support from employees than before the health crisis; nearly as many say they are struggling to prioritize new tasks.
HR leaders are well aware of their team’s high burnout and attrition rates, say HR experts, who note that many of these leaders feel the same way.
“I think there’s an awareness among HR leaders that the past few years have been incredibly challenging and stressful for the function,” says Brad Bell, professor of strategic human resources and director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University.
Bell adds that HR professionals were on the frontlines during the pandemic, helping to shift operations remote and then managing the process of safely bringing employees back to the office. Soon after, many had to navigate transitioning to hybrid work, the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting,” a rise in employee activism around various societal issues and a swath of layoffs as the state of the economy came into question, Bell says.
And any time a company issues a round of layoffs, general and administrative functions, like HR, are the first to be targeted by the C-suite for layoffs, says Laszlo Bock, co-founder and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Transformative CHRO Academy.
“The team that cares for the rest of the employees is often the first team that gets impacted,” says Bock, co-founder and former CEO of Humu and former senior vice president of People Operations at Google. As a result, HR teams find resources more challenging to secure, and he adds that can drive burnout higher.
HR leaders can look to both traditional and unconventional measures to help reduce burnout and high turnover rates among their team members, say Bock and Bell.
8 ways to minimize HR team burnout and turnover
Practice what you preach
“HR has always been the proverbial cobbler’s child. They do all these things for the workforce and often don’t do them for themselves,” Bell says. “I think that’s actually a good place to start because I think HR often doesn’t turn a lot of its processes and practices inward.” HR leaders, for example, can remind their team to take advantage of company wellness benefits, especially after high-pressure tasks like assisting laid-off workers during a company reorganization.
Use technology to lend assistance
Bell says HR leaders are often already looking for ways to ease some of the function’s pressures. He adds that new technology and AI can streamline certain HR processes, free up time for HR practitioners and take some things off their plates.
Be a role model
One of the most significant ways HR leaders can alleviate burnout among their team is by being role models, says Bell. If HR leaders want their teams to avoid checking emails on vacation or refrain from working evenings and weekends, they need to model those desired behaviors. If HR leaders engage in these behaviors, direct reports and team members will assume this is what is expected of them, Bell adds.
Institute blackout days for meetings
Employees who attend too many meetings are apt to feel burnt out, so HR leaders can take the lead on limiting the number of meetings their reports must attend. For example, Bell says, HR leaders can add a list of blackout days or hours to team members’ calendars.
Provide an outside HR community
HR professionals often do not have anyone within their company they can turn to when they want to vent frustrations, which can fuel isolation. “The whole job of HR is sort of about building up the company and getting people excited about it,” Bock says. HR leaders can help reduce this isolation by encouraging their team members to make more external communities, he adds. For example, when he oversaw Google’s HR department, Bock held an open house and invited HR professionals from other nearby companies in the San Francisco Bay Area to celebrate Google receiving the “Best Company to Work For” award. “The subtext was kind of a quiet recruiting event but the idea was to build a local community, so people could talk to one another,” Bock says.
Bend the rules—a little
“When you’re in the people function, you can kind of bend the rules a little bit for your people,” Bock says. That doesn’t mean doing things that are broadly unethical or illegal, but it could be as simple as providing additional PTO informally when team members are stressed and have their work done, Bock says. “Allowing people more flexibility is good for every employee but particularly good for these HR folks who are working really hard,” he notes.
Encourage employees to interview at other companies
Although it may seem counter-intuitive, Bock encouraged his direct reports to interview at other companies every six months. When recruiters approached Bock for a CHRO position, he often referred them to one of the executives or leaders on his HR team after clearing it with the individual. “I did it for a couple of reasons. I cared deeply for my team and thought they should all go on to become heads of HR, and I wanted to help them. Number two, it was feedback for me because the team members would come back and say the attributes they liked about the other job, and it provided me with feedback on how to change their jobs,” Bock says.
Additionally, when these employees were feeling exhausted or had a tough day at work, knowing they had turned down the offer from the other company was a reminder they had chosen to stay, and it wasn’t because they felt stuck in the job, he adds. “When you give people a chance to recommit to something they are doing, they’re more attached to it. It’s something psychologists call the endowment effect,” Bock says. For example, if you give someone a $5 mug and later offer them $5 to give it back, most people will not give it back to you, Bock notes. “That’s because they’ve endowed it with some extra value. I think the same is true of jobs,” he says. He adds that none of the employees he referred to CHRO recruiters took the position.
Consider constant fulfillment
Bock advises HR leaders to constantly think of ways to make their team members’ jobs more fulfilling. They should always assume they will be interviewing at other companies, and as a result, the onus is on HR leadership to always be thinking about their team’s needs.
