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HR professionals play key roles within their organizations, which often means juggling multiple deadlines, handling emergent situations and managing daily administrative tasks. Under these demands, it is common for HR professionals to struggle with burnout, but this can have negative consequences throughout an entire business.
Below, members of Forbes Human Resources Council share key strategies for how HR professionals can safeguard against burnout. With their advice, your organization can take steps to bolster its HR team and prevent the negative impacts of burnout and empathy fatigue.
1. Avoid Empathy Loss By Prioritizing Mental Health
HR burnout erodes empathy, essential for employee support—akin to ignoring your oxygen mask on a plane, compromising everyone's safety. Prioritize HR's mental health as a strategic imperative; their well-being ensures the whole team can breathe easier and perform better. Empowered HR fosters a resilient, engaged and thriving workforce. - Karina Bernacki, VSCO
2. Reduce Stress With Clear Expectations
HR burnout can have a detrimental effect because of the huge influence HR teams have on fostering culture. One individual can have a domino effect on others. As the HR function is fast-paced and everything is urgent, setting clear expectations with partners upfront and using prioritization skills to help teams navigate through the most pressing business issues first can help limit stress. - Jamie Viramontes, Konnect
3. Plan For Self-Care
Human resource professionals play a critical role in supporting the well-being of an organization, but they are not immune to burnout. HR professionals can proactively manage their workload, prioritize self-care and cultivate a work environment of inclusion, excellence and impact, which will reduce the risk and ensure their effectiveness. - MJ Vigil, DispatchHealth
4. Foster Community For Emotional Support
Burnout can trigger a lack of confidence and loss of passion for the discipline. During times of change, we ensure we are overt in creating moments of fun and opportunities for HR community support. A sense of community with co-workers experiencing similar challenges, and helping to create simple action plans, is critical to ensure HR leaders can physically and emotionally recharge. - Andrea Ferrara, PepsiCo Beverages North America
5. Create Plans To Stay Ahead Of Crises
HR is often the firefighter in the organization, and that is a tough way of working and not sustainable. While HR often has the clarity of judgment to assess any situation and provide a solution, HR can rebrand itself to be a strategic partner not just in times of challenge. By showcasing your ability to support the organization through planning, you can avoid being in crisis mode. - Cat Colella-Graham, Coaching for Communicators
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6. Delegate Tasks To Free Up Team Members
Hiring and onboarding can suffer when HR staff experience burnout, leading to bad hires and positions not getting filled. HR teams must have the resources they need to find high-quality talent. Engaging an outside partner who can take on some of your talent acquisition needs—whether they are project-based or more comprehensive—can allow your HR staff to focus on other important initiatives. - Lynne Marie Finn, Broadleaf Results
7. Prioritize Time Off
People function is primarily to manage and meet the expectations of the employees—and at times, to deal with the emotions of the employees—so HR burnout could lead to either the wrong strategy or approach in managing situations that can be detrimental to the business. Some of the means to preventing burnout would be to encourage work-life balance, forceful vacation or time off and managing the workload of the HR team. - Prakash Raichur, Taghleef Industries
8. Meet In Person To Improve Communication
When HR leaders face burnout, they may be tempted to overly rely on surveys to gauge employee satisfaction and engagement. However, this approach can lead to survey fatigue, diminishing the effectiveness of these tools. HR must balance survey use with direct, real-time communication and feedback channels to maintain genuine engagement. - Patrick Donegan, SEI
9. Make Use Of Check-Ins And Development Conversations
When burnout occurs, it can impact the level of empathy an employee brings to their HR role. It is difficult to care for others when your needs are not being met. That's why HR teams must emphasize the basics of self-care—including utilizing all earned time off and benefits offerings. On the job, utilize check-ins and development conversations, job rotations and cross-training to help head off burnout. - Kathryn Medina, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
10. Offer Flexibility And Benefits
Burnout leads to a negative employee experience, diminished morale and ultimately, higher rates of employees seeking opportunities elsewhere. Organizations must implement measures such as reasonable workloads, access to mental health resources, flexible work arrangements and opportunities for professional development and growth. - Nicole Smartt Serres, Smartt Enterprises
11. Build Time For Rest
One detrimental effect of HR burnout is loss of faith in the company—leading to employee attrition. One of the most overlooked critical factors is that employees look to HR to confirm their sense of safety. If HR is confident, involved, rested and invested, they trust that matters will be resolved. When HR is burnt out, that energy impacts employees whose fears become magnified and, as a result, look elsewhere for the undelivered safety and sense of belonging - Tiersa Smith-Hall, Impactful Imprints, Training & Consulting
12. Time Calendars To Manage Heavy Workloads
One way that HR burnout can be prevented is by being deliberate around the timing of the HR calendar. There are naturally busy seasons, typically at the end/beginning of the year. These often result in overlapping priorities—for example, compensation planning, performance reviews, organizational goal setting and open enrollment. Timing deployments and discretionary HR activities can reduce burnout and improve execution. - Jon Lowe, DailyPay
13. Leverage AI Tools To Free Up Time
When HR teams are stretched thin, candidate and employee experiences, new hire onboarding and employee retention initiatives suffer. GenAI can help alleviate burnout and support productivity with time-consuming tasks like creating job descriptions and interview questions to simplify processes. With the right GenAI, TA teams can focus on building meaningful connections with candidates and employees. - Laura Coccaro, iCIMS
14. Promote Well-Being In The Company Culture
HR burnout can decrease productivity and morale, impacting the workplace environment. Prevent it by promoting work-life balance, offering support programs and encouraging regular breaks to recharge. Ensuring a supportive culture filled with trust, respect, dignity for the individual and manageable workloads can help mitigate burnout risks. - Bala Sathyanarayanan, Greif Inc.
15. Ensure Team Members Can Say 'No'
A detrimental effect of HR burnout is a loss of engagement that typically degrades department service delivery, special program success and the launch of new or innovative initiatives. Such an impact can have devastating impacts on organizational culture and development. To prevent this, leaders must understand team limitations and know what you say "no" to is as important as when you say "yes." - Dr. Timothy J. Giardino, BMC Software
16. Prevent Burnout With Benefits And Staffing
There is nothing more dire to me than how individual humans feel, and burnout is a recipe for depression, anxiety and fatigue regardless of role. Add that to the fact that HR teams deal with the nitty-gritty emotions of other teams, and that weight is overwhelming. The solution is preventative: Hire more, leverage flexible work and PTO and offer mental health resources. Stop burnout before it starts. - Ursula Mead, InHerSight
17. Support HR Teams To Maintain Internal Upskilling
Morale is the most visible, but the most alarming is the erosion of career development. Without engaged HR team members, talent upskilling efforts are sidelined in favor of external hiring for all needs, big and small. This deprives current employees of advancement opportunities, locking them into fixed positions and skills, and hindering their long-term effectiveness, satisfaction and growth. - Nicky Hancock, AMS
18. Offer Resources To Promote Mental Health
Burnout can affect anyone in an organization, but HR burnout has an especially profound impact on the organization. When HR loses productivity due to burnout, hiring often slows down as well, which can increase workloads across the board. The best way to prevent burnout is to offer resources like access to mental health care, PTO, flex schedules and Employee Assistance Programs. - Niki Jorgensen, Insperity
19. Use Technology To Reduce Administrative Tasks
HR burnout erodes trust and credibility. Overwhelmed HR professionals lose focus, overlook details and become unresponsive. This strains communication and leads to a perception that HR is unapproachable or ineffective. Investing in HR technology and tools to streamline processes and automate repetitive tasks reduces the administrative burden on HR professionals, helping to prevent burnout. - Katrina Jones, Acacia Network
20. Focus On HR Engagement For Widespread Impact
HR burnout diminishes the quality of support provided to the organization, and this can lead to lower employee morale, higher turnover rates and a decrease in overall productivity. The well-being and engagement of the entire workforce can be negatively impacted. - Britton Bloch, Navy Federal
