According to a 2022 survey by Workvivo, 98% of HR professionals have recently felt burned out. These rates are higher than those of other divisions, such as sales, which record a burnout rate of under 90%, according to Gartner.
One of the significant challenges facing HR employees is senior leadership. Workvivo’s survey found that fewer than one in three employees felt valued by their employers.
Without support, work will inevitably be unrewarding. Sigler’s sentiment was repeated numerous times across Reddit.
“As an HR professional, I can invest a great deal of effort over months or even years to accomplish a change I believe in, and all that time, I see no evidence that I’m making a difference.”
Jennifer E. Sigler, Ph.D., head of research at FOUNT Global, Inc.
Sigler believes the problem persists because companies are still using the 200-year-old lessons from the Industrial Revolution in today’s modern workplace. She said managers need to stop working to these principles and instead break down the assembly line style still in use by too many HR teams.
Some suggest that leaders are not prioritizing the human elements of the business. Alexis Robin, co-founder of pLink Leadership, said, “A large percentage of HR professionals are experiencing burnout due to overworked and overwhelmed internal customers struggling to prioritize time for recruiting, leadership development, and people projects.”
To rectify this, allow HR professionals to exercise the full spectrum of their creative and problem-solving skills, suggested Sigler. When HR teams can utilize their humanity positively, there will be a positive impact on others in the business, and results will be seen early, not years later.
As Sigler noted, the bureaucratic set up of many current businesses result in siloed programmatic divisions that are over-layered and connected with numerous processes. These cumbersome and impractical systems are unrewarding and prompt HR professionals to feel like they’re diverting attention from their primary focus: the people.
HR teams need to be allowed to decide what metrics are essential and report on those. And senior leaders need to take the reports seriously.
Read the full article, Why HR Professionals Are Burned Out, According to Reddit on the Reworked website.
