UK 
United States
Those three words, ‘I’m in HR’ are by some accompanied by a quiet cough or an apologetic nervous lip-curling – comparatively other professional declarations are delivered with a proud aplomb, ‘I’m a pilot,’ or ‘I’m a teacher’.
Why is this? And why is the profession still dogged with a cloud of suspicion and a feeling that it needs either an explanation or a justification for its existence? After all it now commands an army of staff in most organisations – there’s a department dedicated to it in most instances, and it is additionally smothered in a few professional bodies that represent it and guard against whispers that it has no standards. There’s even the CIPD qualification for those that want the badge – it’s like being in a fancy members-only club where the vetting process is hard-core studying. That must mean something, surely it can no longer be swimming in the ranks of second-class citizenship, or is it?
‘Things could be better in HR’
One dent in the shiny HR brand is the swirling reports that it’s a function in crisis.
Just over half, 52% of UK HR professionals say they have experienced burnout in the past five years, according to new research from Personio – an all-in-one HR solution. According to their findings, this burnout crisis is driving a mass exodus, with 34% of HR professionals contemplating their exit from the industry and imagine that some of that numbers weren’t even wedded to the idea in the first place – joining the throng of the ‘coughing’ apologisers for being part of HR in the first place.
The report reveals that nearly four in ten HR professionals face excessive workloads and 41% lose productivity to unnecessary administration tasks. The latter of which is why HR traditionally suffered a bad reputation because they were thought of as the sole demise of the paper-pushers and the people that ‘filed’ things in drawers.
In my opinion the term HR carries some legacy bias to what such professionals actually do. There has been a huge shift over the past 10 years in which this function is now intentionally much more commercially savvy and business facing
I remember being part of a dot com start up in the late 90s and I had a very strange, dual role as ‘Office Manager’ and ‘Editor’ – this meant I simultaneously wrote articles while working out how to get the filing cabinet closed and the key turned on people’s personal information because that’s where it was kept – I was party to several bits of paper that contained everything from DOB to salary and all that goes between. That six-drawer machine was the stuff of scammers’ dreams – it was all there for the taking.
