The Elephant in the Org
The "Elephant in the Org" podcast is a daring dive into the unspoken challenges and opportunities in organizational development, particularly in the realm of employee experience. Hosted by the team at The Fearless PX, we tackle the "elephants" in the room—those taboo or ignored topics—that are critical for creating psychologically safe and highly effective workplaces.
The Elephant in the Org
“The HR Breakdown: Dr Jo Burrell on Why the Function That Fixes Everything Is Falling Apart.”
The HR Breakdown: Dr Jo Burrell on Why the Function That Fixes Everything Is Falling Apart
HR isn’t “a bit stressed.” HR isn’t “managing fine.” HR isn’t “designed to be everyone’s emotional shock absorber.”
The latest data finally confirms what every HR human already knows in their bones:
The profession responsible for everyone else’s wellbeing is quietly falling apart.
In this raw, unfiltered, data-driven conversation, we sit down with Dr Jo Burrell — Clinical Psychologist, co-founder of Ultimate Resilience, and one of HR Magazine’s Most Influential Thinkers 2025 — to unpack her groundbreaking findings on HR mental wellbeing… and the systemic failures that put HR professionals at clinical levels of depression, anxiety, burnout, and moral injury.
Jo walks us through the research, the human cost, and the emotional labour nobody sees.
Then she introduces an actual solution: HR Supervision — the psychologically informed support model used in clinical professions that could finally make HR sustainable.
If you work in HR, lead HR, or have ever forwarded a problem with the phrase “Can HR just handle this?”, this episode is your reality check.
In This Episode
- The shocking stats from Jo’s HR Mental Wellbeing Report
- Why HR is experiencing clinical distress levels
- The moral injury of delivering decisions you didn’t make
- HR as the organisational “junk drawer”
- Why employees blame HR instead of the actual decision-makers
- The parentified-child → HR professional pipeline
- Why self-care is not — and never will be — the solution
- What HR Supervision is and why it matters
- How to build a psychologically safe workplace when HR is drowning
Dr Jo Burrell on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jo-burrell-04901a96/
2025 HR Mental Wellbeing Survey Report (Free Download):
Listen, subscribe, share
If this episode made you feel seen, vindicated, or slightly ragey in a productive way, send it to another HR human who needs it.
And l
🐘 Connect with Us:
🚀 Follow The Fearless PX on LinkedIn: The Fearless PX
📩 Got a hot take or a workplace horror story? Email Marion, Cacha, and Danny at elephant@thefearlesspx.com
🎧 Catch every episode of The Elephant in the Org: All Episodes Here
🚀Your Hosts on Linkedin:
💬 Like what you hear?
Subscribe, leave a ★★★★★ review, and help us bring more elephants into the light.
🎙️ About the Show
The Elephant in the Org drops new episodes every two weeks starting April 2024.
Get ready for even more fearless conversations about leadership, psychological safety, and the future of work.
🎵 Music & Production Credits
🎶 Opening and closing theme music by The Toros
🎙️ Produced by The Fearless PX
✂️ Edited by Marion Anderson
⚠️ Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests, and do not necessarily reflect any affiliated organizations' official policy or position.
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Danny Gluch: Welcome back to the Elephant in the org, everyone. I'm Danny Gletch, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Kasha Dora.
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Cacha Dora: Hello?
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Danny Gluch: And Marion Anderson?
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Marion: Hello!
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Danny Gluch: And today we have a fantastic guest, Dr. Joe Burrell. Introduce yourselves to the listeners.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Hi, so, I'm Dr Jo Burrell. I'm a clinical psychologist in the UK. I, worked in the National Health Service in the NHS for… in the UK for around 20 or so years.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And then I set up my business, Ultimate Resilience, alongside another clinical psychologist about 10 or 11 years ago now. And, we've been doing all sorts of work around workplace well-being.
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Dr Jo Burrell: training and coaching and so on since then, but we became very interested in the mental well-being of HR professionals around the time of the pandemic, and I think we're going to be talking a bit more about that today.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah, and it's a spicy one.
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Marion: It sure is, it sure is, and I feel like I'm speaking for my people here, and myself, because, my peers, our peers are crumbling.
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Marion: And, you know.
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Marion: a stat that I picked up earlier on, SHRM, have said over half of, HR professionals in the US are working way beyond capacity. I can attest to that. I think most HR practitioners can.
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Marion: 40% feel overwhelmed, 1 in 10 admit that they're burning out. In the public sector, it's even worse.
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Marion: the UK is no different to the US, you know, this is a… this is a global problem. And, you know, I think
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Marion: We're often tasked as being the ones to hold everything together.
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Marion: And no one's actually asking.
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Marion: are you okay? Are you falling apart over there? And so, that's really the elephant that we wanted to call out today. HR.
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Marion: practitioners, professionals, are struggling. And, Joel, you did some great research around this. We'd love to hear more about that.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Yeah, so back in 2021 or so, around the time of the pandemic, we noticed a change.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And the change was that HR professionals had been the people who typically commissioned our services, but they weren't necessarily the people who utilized them.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, they weren't attending our workshops or reaching out for coaching. But suddenly, that changed, and they started to do that. They started to reach out much more for help for themselves. And we just thought this was a really interesting shift, and wondered what was going on.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So, the first thing we did was we looked to see if there was any data out there about the mental well-being of HR professionals, because we're academics by background, we've got published research, you know, that's the first thing you do when you've got a question, isn't it? It's like, where's the research? Where's the data?
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Dr Jo Burrell: And what did we find?
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Dr Jo Burrell: Nothing.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, very little, information specifically about the mental well-being of HR professionals. So we thought, well, why don't we do a survey?
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Dr Jo Burrell: So we designed a survey, and it was, it went out to, into the world in, back end of 2023.
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Dr Jo Burrell: We had 100 respondents. It was essentially a pilot, really. We were just sort of… we designed it, we thought, well, let's try it and see what happens.
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Dr Jo Burrell: We produced a report in 2024, and that attracted quite a lot of attention, that report. And so, I guess what we realized is that we were tapping into something that was going on under the surface that people weren't really talking about very much. And certainly.
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Dr Jo Burrell: the results were highlighting some very serious issues. So we repeated our survey this year, 2025, in February this year.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And this time, we had almost 1,500 respondents.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So in the meantime, I guess we'd become known as people who talk about HR wellbeing, and…
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Danny Gluch: beautiful.
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Dr Jo Burrell: We'd, we'd kind of attracted the attention of people, and they really… they responded in their droves to our survey.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And, so now what we have is, you know, a pretty robust set of data, which is telling us something really powerful and interesting and concerning about the mental well-being of HR professionals.
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Marion: Hmm.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah, it's… it's eye-opening. It really is. When Marion first shared it with us, and was like, we have to have her on the podcast.
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Danny Gluch: I read it, and I was just like, this is… this is, one, unbelievable that I'd never seen this before, and now that you're telling the history of the research, it makes more sense. This is… this is unique, data points, and it was just eye-opening. What were some of the…
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Danny Gluch: the findings that, like, shocked you? I imagine maybe you weren't shocked or surprised, but, you know, what were the findings that you were like, oh my goodness, this is… this is a really big deal?
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Dr Jo Burrell: Well, it's an interesting question because, of course, you know, we've had conversations with lots of HR professionals, and they've been telling us, anecdotally, that they were struggling, but we didn't know what the data was going to say. You know, maybe we were just talking to some particularly stressed people, you know?
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Danny Gluch: squeaky wheels.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And maybe that first survey, you know, wasn't representative of what was really going on. But one of the interesting things to note was that, actually, the findings of the first survey were very similar, were sort of replicated, really, in the second survey.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So we were definitely spotlighting something in that first survey that was much broader than that 100 people who responded.
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Cacha Dora: Yeah, it's some data validation right there, if you, like, textbook data validation.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Absolutely. So, and one of the things to say about the design of the survey is, because we're clinicians, we used clinical measures of depression, anxiety, well-being, burnout. These are measures, questionnaires that we would have used in our clinical work when we were working in healthcare services.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And so… and it was important to us to use measures that we knew were statistically valid.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, we didn't just make a load of questions and send them out, you know? It was important to us to make sure we were going to be gathering data that was really robust and sound.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And as we've already highlighted, this was really quite shocking data. So actually, what we found was, we found that 44% of our respondents, so almost half.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Met the threshold for clinically significant symptoms of depression.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And what we know is, comparing that to population data within the UK, is that that's two and a half times higher than the rate of depression within the general population.
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Cacha Dora: Wild.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So not only is it a high figure, but it's significantly higher than your general population. So if you're thinking about your workforce, interestingly, you know, I guess one conclusion we can draw is that
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Dr Jo Burrell: HR professionals are suffering more than everyone else, and they're the ones who are charged with looking after people's well-being, ironically.
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Cacha Dora: Yep.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So that's depression, then anxiety, 68… sorry, 38% of respondents, meeting the threshold for clinically significant symptoms of anxiety, which is 1.5 times higher than the general population.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Then moving on to burnout, the burnout measure we used found that 63% were very likely to be suffering from burnout.
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Marion: And a further 15% at risk of burnout.
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Dr Jo Burrell: That's almost 8… that's almost 4 out of every 5.
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Cacha Dora: Right.
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Danny Gluch: HR professionals.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Yeah, yeah. 67% in the, in the, in the category for low well-being.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And then we asked a couple of… some additional… a number of additional questions, but some of the highlights. We asked, are you thinking about leaving the profession?
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Dr Jo Burrell: Yes or no. 42% said they were thinking about leaving.
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Marion: Yep.
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Cacha Dora: It's almost half as well.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Almost half, absolutely. And we also asked about, people's support at work.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So, whether they felt supported in relation to their mental well-being at work.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And only 13% said they felt well supported.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So that leaves 87% of people who feel that support is lacking to some degree, and actually, half of our respondents were feeling that it was significantly lacking. So either not at all, no support at all, or very rarely feeling supported.
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Cacha Dora: Hmm.
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Danny Gluch: Wow. That's just… So…
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Marion: It's not surprising, it's shocking.
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Marion: But it's not, it's not surprising.
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Cacha Dora: I feel like the word that comes to mind is staggering, you know? Like, it's that I'm not surprised, I'm shocked. You know what I mean? Where it, man, I just feel like I want to give everyone I know in HR a hug, just hearing those numbers.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Hmm.
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Marion: I'm not just…
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Dr Jo Burrell: I was gonna say, one of the things that's surprising, too, is that we didn't know this already. Like, there wasn't… this didn't exist.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And that's a question in itself, isn't it? Why were we not looking at this? Why was no one asking this question?
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Danny Gluch: Yeah.
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Cacha Dora: He just came along and we went, oh, this is interesting. Well, I think, you know, it's that…
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Dr Jo Burrell: Yeah, Joe Good.
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Cacha Dora: like, the joke of, like, how do you, like, call HR on HR? But then when you kind of, like, flip the joke around, and the check-in mindset.
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Cacha Dora: And be like, you know, who does HR go to when HR needs HR? You know what I mean? Like, instead of it being the joke, being the actual support lever that the whole function operates as.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah.
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Marion: Yeah. Yeah, I've got a bunch of theories in here, like, obviously this is my lived experience, right, for a couple of decades, and…
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Marion: there's a few things in here, and I'm talking for myself here, but I was a parentified child.
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Marion: So, I grew up having to anticipate the needs of my disabled parents, anticipate the needs of others, always, always evaluating and mitigating for risk, which led to me being a highly anxious child.
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Marion: depressed, not… not diagnosed until I was older, but looking back, I was depressed.
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Marion: And… A sense of…
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Marion: the only way to show my value to others is by the service that I provide them, right? And so it's not a surprise that I and people like me gravitate into a profession such as HR, which is about the service of others.
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Marion: But here's the thing that you learn when you get into HR. A lot of people say, you know, if you say to them, why is it you want a career in HR? They're like, I like people. Do you know what? I'm in HR. I fucking hate people most of the time. And not because they're terrible people, because they're… people are… people are, at the very core, good people, right?
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Marion: But what happens is you give, and you give, and you give, and you give, and you're constantly mitigating risks, and you're constantly on higher layer, and you're constantly trying to anticipate those needs of others, and it's thankless.
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Marion: You know, it's expected, it's, you know, if you drop a ball, you're a complete failure, but when you are kind of, you know, getting all this stuff
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Marion: Right?
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Marion: no one notices, no one says, great job, right? And so, it doesn't shock me that when I read state, data around recognition within HR professionals, that it's, like, non-existent.
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Marion: Because no one ever says, well done. Never. It's just expected. And so, I think that, you know, when you have…
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Marion: Probably a higher proportion of practitioners who've maybe gravitated into the role
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Marion: you know, with a similar journey to me, I can see why that depression and that burnout and all of that stuff is there, because you are conditioned to constantly be in the notion of service, and this is a thankless, thankless profession as it stands today.
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Marion: And I think that, you know, research… this research in particular is really shining a light on that. For the first time, you're right, this data did not exist. I think it was…
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Marion: probably battied about anecdotally, but let's face it, HR is, I say this all the time, the junk drawer of the organization, and usually, the… either the butt of the jokes or the most hated in the organization. And there's only so much of that abuse
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Marion: Because that's really what it is that, you know, humans can take. So it doesn't shock me that there's that number of people leaving the profession. Particularly at the senior end, chief people officers. You know, I see incredible, incredible CPOs that
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Marion: Burn out after maybe 2 to 3 rolls.
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Marion: And once they've done that, and they've got, you know, they've got their RSUs, and they've made their money, and they're like, do you know what, peace out, I'm out. Like, I am done. And they go off and consult or write books, or whatever. And that is sad. And that's happening because they're coming in, they're building orgs, they're giving everything they've got, and after a few years.
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Marion: they've got nothing left to give, and they're teetering on the edge of breakdowns, and I've seen practitioners have breakdowns. We've had a breakdown, right? Exacerbated by work. Work was not the root cause.
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Marion: But…
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Marion: Certainly, when you're carrying so much of an organization, and you already have psychological challenges, this is what tips you over the edge.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Danny Gluch: when… when I was… Reading the… the paper, and…
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Danny Gluch: Listening to you talk, the anecdotally of…
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Danny Gluch: you went from being hired by HR to HR taking your training, getting your support. Do you think that was…
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Danny Gluch: a function of, you know, just sort of, like, well-being being more approachable, you know, being something that is more okay, less taboo to do? Or do you think that there was a shift somewhere during, I don't know, maybe the global pandemic?
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Danny Gluch: Where there was actually… all of these issues with HR actually was getting more intense.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Yeah, I mean, I think, undoubtedly, that the pandemic was like a catalyst
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, and I think that, you know, it's my sense, and obviously I don't have data from before our first survey, but my sense now from, you know, I've got so many conversations with HR professionals, I'm really kind of getting to know the profession so much more, and obviously there's still lots to learn.
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Dr Jo Burrell: But my sense is that there were issues rumbling along under the surface for a long time before the pandemic.
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Dr Jo Burrell: But then the pandemic happened, and actually, you know, HR professionals were in the eye of the storm.
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Marion: Hmm.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And again, they were… but they weren't recognized for being such, you know? Typically, it's like, when we thought about workers who were on the front line, key workers in the… in, you know, during the pandemic, it was healthcare workers, it was.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, transport workers, it was people like that, supermarket workers.
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Dr Jo Burrell: We didn't think about HR, but actually.
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Dr Jo Burrell: everything landed on their laps, didn't it? You know, it was like everything was your responsibility, you know, whether people had, you know, laptops at home, whether there was a policy in place for hybrid working, whether, you know, the whole furlough thing, you know.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And so, it feels like that was, like, the last straw, it seems to me, and that was the point at which they all kind of start… not everyone, but, you know, a lot of people started to kind of hit breaking point.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And sadly, since then, it seems to me there's been no let-up.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Immediately, you've got flexible working policies you've got to deal with, you've got a cost of living crisis, you've got a global situation which is impacting every employee, because there's all this kind of existential angst everywhere, so everyone's
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Dr Jo Burrell: Makes the mental health issues are going up.
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Dr Jo Burrell: In the UK, there's major overhaul of employment law at the moment, so this is… all these changes, you know, are on the horizon, so there's this constant stream of
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Dr Jo Burrell: stressors that are landing on the desks of HR professionals. So I think it's a catalyst, but I definitely don't think.
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Danny Gluch: that was where the problem started. I think the problems…
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Dr Jo Burrell: Long time before that.
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Marion: Yeah, I mean, there's… there's, again, there's so much in there to unpack. I was kind of laughing when you were talking about the pandemic, because, I mean, Pasha, Dani, you saw me, as a CPO lead through the pandemic.
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Marion: What would you say about that when you watched me do that and go through that stuff?
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Danny Gluch: Super easy and fun.
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Cacha Dora: Ugh.
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Danny Gluch: What are you talking about? You were a joy to work with.
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Cacha Dora: Yeah, but I will say…
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Marion: Nope.
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Cacha Dora: I will say this, yes, Danny, you're completely correct, joy to work with, but that phrase of, like, roll with the punches, how many punches does someone take, right? Like, because that's really what it was, especially during the pandemic, because it really was just so…
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Cacha Dora: much uncharted territory for people. There was no manual, like, there was no playbook, there was no instructions on what to do, and we…
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Cacha Dora: the HR… Field, right, was waiting on whatever information was coming from other sources. Yeah. And…
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Cacha Dora: You move all of that forward, and people…
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Cacha Dora: are still going to look to HR when HR is like, I don't have a resource here. Like, there is no resource for me. There is not, like.
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Cacha Dora: What do you do when your federal government, your state government, whatever that is, is like, do not let people in the building?
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Marion: Yeah.
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Cacha Dora: And you're going.
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Cacha Dora: what? Now I have to change a policy, now I have to make sure that people have vaccinations, or, like, I'm getting fined. Like, you know, there's actual business ramification, not just
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Cacha Dora: And legal ramification, then you have, like, your actual human cost of life, like, and where does it all fall?
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Marion: Yeah, I, you know, when I compare…
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Marion: how things happened in the US versus how things happened in the UK. The UK was… the UK was a lot more strict, a lot more rigidity, and also, as Brits, we're pretty conformist, right? If we're told to do something, we do it, because that's pretty much in the British DNA, right?
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Marion: But J…
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Cacha Dora: The art of the queue. Art of the queue.
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Marion: Over here, this lot are mental, because it's all about, you know, freedom of speech and my civil liberties and all of that stuff. And so, where in the UK, the government says, yeah, you're closed, here, you've got…
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Cacha Dora: They're like, but are… Are we…
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Marion: Yeah, and you've got two groups. You've got, you know, your more, your more, you know, liberal, left, whatever you want to call them, who are, like.
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Marion: Let's… let's take our vaccines, let's do the thing, let's follow the instructions, let's make sure we're safe. And then you've got, on the other end of the scale, like.
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Marion: antivirus, and you can't tell me I can't go to the office, and that's even worse if your CEO isn't of that mindset, and you're having to try and navigate that one, right? So, like, over here, it was literally the Wild West, and I think that that…
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Marion: put an even greater amount of pressure on HR practitioners, because you're trying to balance the needs of your people, the health and safety and well-being of your people.
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Marion: And, you know, the expectations of a C-suite and a shareholder population, because, you know, we only cared about shareholders in the US.
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Marion: And… That, I think, has done more damage
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Marion: than the rest of the pandemic for HR practitioners put together. And one of the phrases that these guys heard me say constantly over the course of the pandemic, because everyone looks to HR for the answers, whenever there's anything that's slightly ambiguous in an organization.
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Marion: Why stop SkHR, right?
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Marion: And I would just go, like, guys.
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Marion: they don't train us this stuff in HR school. No one takes us aside one day and says, in the event of a pandemic, this is what you do, right? So, like, I'm just making this shit up as I go along. I'm just trying to take…
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Marion: credible data, listen to expertise, and just try and figure this out to the best of my abilities, and I think that
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Marion: the sustained damage that all of that has done to us is insurmountable. And so, I think that, you know, for the
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Marion: Current generation of HR practitioners
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Marion: I think we're done. I think we're done. And I'm very interested to see what this reset could bring, because this takes me to my second point. Why is the profession so broken?
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Marion: Because we actually don't know what the job design is, right? Like, one of the things that I bang on about all the time is the interchangeability of job titles. Like, if you ask 100 people, what's the difference between a CPO and a CHRO? You get 100 different answers. If you asked
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Marion: Joe blogs in an organization, you know, who do you go to for payroll, or who do you go to for a strategic thing, or whatever? They're gonna go, my HR,
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Marion: But I'm like, well.
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Marion: HR's a little bit like going to see, you know, going to the doctors. You know, would you go to see a dentist for a gynecological problem? No, because that's not the practitioner that you need, right? It's the same in HR, right? If I've got a learning thing that I need to craft
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Marion: tools or structure or strategy, I'm going to go to my L&DOD team. If I've got, you know, a headcount strategic, situation, I'm going to go to my HRBP. If I've got a, Joe is, you know, misbehaving and punched a colleague.
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Marion: I'm gonna go to my, you know, employee relations, or my HR manager, or whoever that kind of frontline tactical is, but most organizations could not tell you that. They couldn't differentiate between the specialities and the roles. So that adds even more stress to HR practitioners, because everything just gets dumped on your lap.
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Marion: And… one last thing on that is.
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Marion: I read the… someone had posted on LinkedIn the other day, about the sheer…
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Marion: I think distress might be the right word, but they made a comment about how
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Marion: Often, no one even uses their name in the organization, they just refer to them as HR.
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Marion: And I know how that pisses me off, right? And I'll… I'm at a point where I'll just go, my name's Marion, great to meet you, right? HR is… is what I do, but it's not who I am.
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Marion: And so, I think that there's so lack of respect and really understanding for what it is that we do, because people are looking back to
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Marion: the days of personnel management and, you know, when you just shuffled around with bits of paper, and you were the policy and procedure police. And the professions moved on, but people's understandings of what we do, and the reluctance to let go of that stereotype
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Marion: hasn't shifted, and I often say, how much of that is our own fault for not advocating for ourselves and for not standing up to that? And I actually think that we have a lot to answer for that, too.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And actually, I'll.
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Cacha Dora: Right?
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Cacha Dora: Oh, go ahead.
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Dr Jo Burrell: I was just gonna… it sort of struck me while you were talking that, I think it's no coincidence that
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Dr Jo Burrell: HR professionals are referred to in a sort of dehumanized way.
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Marion: you know.
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Dr Jo Burrell: It's not an accident. There's something going on there, isn't there? Which is that I think it's convenient for everyone to perceive that HR professionals are not quite human, you know?
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Marion: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: That they don't have human needs.
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Dr Jo Burrell: That they don't have human emotions.
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Marion: And that they are a kind of… I suppose it's, you know, convenient on a number of levels, that they, you know, we don't have to worry about their human needs, because they don't have them, their human emotions, because they don't have them, but we also don't have to worry if we throw all our stuff at them.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Do you know what I mean? We throw, you know, we get cross with them, we blame them, we get angry with them, we criticize them, we see them as responsible for all the ills. You know, we don't have to worry about that either.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Because they're not really human beings, you know? So, that terming of HR professionals as HR, your HR, is… it tells us, it communicates something actually quite serious that's going on.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Cacha Dora: And I think…
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Cacha Dora: Just building on what both of you also said, right, when we think about, like, that invisibility, to… to…
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Cacha Dora: you as a person within a function, and then also the invisibility. So it's like you as the person, but then when you think about what you do.
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Cacha Dora: People, when they think of HR, they think that, you know, you're the… HR's not the one making the decision to lay people off.
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Cacha Dora: HR is given a responsibility split across that whole organization.
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Cacha Dora: to make a layoff happen. It's not one person that's delivering it, right? Like, it happens across the board. But then the exact opposite, HR is also not the people deciding to hire you.
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Cacha Dora: Right? Like, that's coming from someone else, and then… but what happens when you get hired? The whole org takes that on, between your comp team, and your talent team, and your learning and development team. It's spread across the board. There's so much that happens, but it all, at the end of the day.
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Cacha Dora: Comes back to that.
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Cacha Dora: I'm… you don't… you never say, like, I am HR, right? Like, you're like, I'm in HR, or I'm HR. I like just to… I'm HR adjacent. Like, I'm… I'm in it, but I'm, like, not in it. It's different. And then, at least with the adjacent, people actually start asking questions, but,
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Cacha Dora: I think it really does highlight that invisibility, both on the job and on the individual human level as well.
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Marion: Something else you just said there, Kasia, that reminded me of this… I've talked to you guys about this before, like…
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Marion: And I don't feel it so much now, I think, maybe because…
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Marion: we have our own work going on, and we do a lot of this advocacy stuff, and I feel very proud of that. But for the longest time, I actually felt quite embarrassed when people would ask me what I did. And I would say, I'm a chief people officer, and they'd be like.
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Marion: What's that? This is relatively new terminology.
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Marion: And you know that you're gonna have to say, well.
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Marion: HR, and as soon as you say it, especially, you know, when I was single, when I was in a bar, and, you know, some hot guy, and he's like, what are you doing? I'm like.
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Marion: Because there's shame connected with it, not because of the work that I do, but because of the way that people perceive it.
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Marion: And I think, again, shame, we know, is one of the most toxic emotions that exists. And I've put my heart and soul into this job, like, I have… I have a master's in International HR, I'm finishing a PhD, my research is in this area, like.
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Marion: I put my heart and soul into it, so I should be proud of that. I should feel shame when I'm disclosing to someone what it is that I do, and yet as soon as the… those two letters pulled out your mouth, HR, you see the look on people's face change, and you're… and it's… sometimes it's like, or…
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Marion: Poor you, or… or, like, it's all of these types of negative reactions, and it's… awful.
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Marion: It's really awful.
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Dr Jo Burrell: The word scapegoating comes to mind.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Anything about the, kind of, how HR…
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, professionals become the sort of container for all the ills of the organization.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: They become the, the, the, the apparent location
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Dr Jo Burrell: Of all the ills of the organization. I had a comment once on LinkedIn where someone said.
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Dr Jo Burrell: HR, because I'm talking a lot about the well-being of HR professionals, obviously, where they said, you know, I don't see why… why we have to be sympathetic towards HR professionals. They're responsible for every problem that happens in an organization, from recruitment right through to people leaving, you know, to performance, to this, to that, and I was like.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Hang on, there are, like, senior leaders in organisations who make most of the main decisions. What about them?
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Marion: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: No, it's HR, it's HR, it's like, I don't know, there's a need to identify a particular figure and pin it all on there.
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Marion: Oh!
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Dr Jo Burrell: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Then, like, what we have to take.
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Marion: But it happened, it happens. And I've been in… I've been in meetings where, like, I'm at that point in my career now where I'm so confident in my knowledge and my abilities.
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Marion: I won't… I'll call people out for that shit, right? But when I was younger, you know, and I was less confident, and, you know, I would take that abuse and I would internalize it.
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Marion: And I would feel less than. Whereas now, you know, if someone says, well, that's HR's fault, or HR said that, I'll be like, oh!
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Marion: No, no, no, no, no.
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Marion: And I will call them out, and I'll be like, let's just get one thing straight here, because I am tired of being the scapegoat. I'm tired of taking the blame. I'm tired of being, like.
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Marion: you know, this junk drawer that everyone can just chuck stuff at and be like, go sort it out. No, that is not what I'm here to do. And so, I think the more that we can empower our practitioners to, one, understand what it is that they're there to do and what they're not there to do.
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Marion: But two, really empower them to be able to draw the line in the sand and say, No.
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Marion: And for many of us, again, going back to that parentified child, etc, saying no is very hard. And that's where I think
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Marion: We have to do a better job of recognizing the characteristics of the type of people that tend to navigate towards, or migrate towards this type of profession, and really set them up for success, because if not.
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Marion: it's… it's abuse. That's what's happening.
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Cacha Dora: And…
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Marion: It's tragic.
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Cacha Dora: It's also, I think.
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Cacha Dora: For a lot of people, saying no is hard, but also, like, if you put the organizational language lens on, it's a reframe of accountability.
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Cacha Dora: And it's very easy for people to not want to take accountability
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Cacha Dora: for whatever the circumstances are now, there's many reasons you go to HR, because you don't know where to go, and you're going there for some kind of guidance or support. It's like going to
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Cacha Dora: I don't know, you're in ancient Greece and you're going to the oracles because you've got questions. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's what… it's the same thing that happens now when people go to HR in their business profession, but, like, when there are opportunities for our people teams to say no to certain things, it's also a question of, like, is the accountability
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Cacha Dora: Is the ownership really on me, or is it on the person that I'm sitting across from? And how do I get that message across to them?
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Cacha Dora: To mirror it.
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Cacha Dora: Back to them.
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Cacha Dora: And that's so difficult, because people aren't trained in that.
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Cacha Dora: Going back to what you mentioned earlier, right, Marian? Like, there is no real training on how to do that. There's training on how to uphold policy. There's training on how to develop policy.
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Cacha Dora: But on… having people Claim what is theirs, and claim what is not theirs.
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Cacha Dora: That requires a lot of emotional fortitude. And if you're already tired, and if you're already
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Cacha Dora: Not feeling supported, that emotional fortitude's a lot harder to pull up from the… from… from the ground up.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Danny Gluch: Dr. Joe, something I wanted to ask you about, in this sort of idea of accountability and ownership.
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Danny Gluch: and HR, you know, the paper pushers, the, you know, hey, it's not us, we're just enforcing policy, sort of our, you know, historical role, to now we're shifting more strategic, and we want to be seen as strategic partners.
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Danny Gluch: And I wonder if the workload, the responsibility, the accountability is becoming too concentrated and too much to where, oh, we aren't just able to wash our hands and say, well, that's just the policy, where we are positioning ourselves in the organization as strategic partners.
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Danny Gluch: is it too much to… to take ownership of some of those decisions? Is actually the trying to be a strategic HR taking… is that part of the reason the, you know.
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Dr Jo Burrell: The labor, the workload is being so detrimental.
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Dr Jo Burrell: I certainly think that, you know, we know that the remit of the job has changed, you know, immeasurably over the last 20 to 30 years. So it has gone from being essentially an admin role to a much broader role, a much… it's become professionalized.
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Danny Gluch: And that's no bad thing, because actually, you know, HR professionals have become central pillars of organizations, you know, and they bring this kind of unique set of skills and knowledge.
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Dr Jo Burrell: and abilities, but I hear that kind of concern a lot around, I guess, the kind of… the breadth of the remit. And I think that the whole titles thing that you were talking about earlier, I know there's confusion about the role, there's confusion about titles, but there's also a lot of titles.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And, you know, I've really struggled to get my head around all of those titles, and to me, again, it represents something that's going on, which is…
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Dr Jo Burrell: does… it's… the remit feels too broad, and I don't think it's necessarily the adding of being strategic that is the issue, I just think it's become too broad.
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Danny Gluch: Hmm.
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Dr Jo Burrell: you know, maybe it needs… the profession needs kind of dividing up into kind of clear… much more clearer specialisms, I don't know, but certainly, that… that issue of it being an incredibly broad area, and it's one of the reasons why, if you've got a problem, you send it to HR, isn't it? It's like…
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Dr Jo Burrell: Because they do everything, you know?
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Marion: Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you work in larger organizations.
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Marion: it… you do have a bit more definition, I suppose, but there's still an element of… of junk drawing, you know, as a… as a people partner, like, the amount of crap that comes to me, and I'm like, that's not me, you know? So, again, it's still… there's still that lack of understanding, but…
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Marion: The other thing is that when you're in a startup environment.
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Marion: Traditionally, you know, as a startup's beginning, they'll bring on someone to do HR. Now, sometimes it's like the office manager who runs payroll and then wings it.
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Marion: Or, you know, sometimes they'll bring someone in as maybe an HR coordinator, let them grow to HR manager, they're learning on the fly, they're not learning from anyone, because guess what? They're figuring it out as they go.
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Marion: And so, they either sink or swim.
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Marion: And… or they bring in people that are experienced and educated and know how to do it.
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Marion: But under-resource them, because they don't see it as a necessity to give them
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Marion: the specialisms that are required to be able to provide that broad spectrum of people service, right, or employee experience.
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Marion: But I think the world is changing, and I think that fractional work
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Marion: is going to be the new way forward for human resources. We're at a breaking point, like, we're past the breaking point, like, we're fucked, right? But what fractional work does is allow companies to bring in those specialisms as and when they need it.
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Marion: as opposed to hiring someone full-time, which is a waste of resource because, you know, they're only going to need them for maybe, like, 10% of the time, right? Maybe it's, like, total rewards, or, you know, those types of specialisms.
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Marion: And I think that that's what's…
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Marion: that's where the smart practitioners are gonna move towards. They're going to curate a portfolio of different organizations that they work with on a fractional basis, as opposed to trying to be
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Marion: jack-of-all-trades to one org, because it's not working, it doesn't work for the organization, it doesn't work for the employees, it certainly doesn't work for the poor bugger doing the job, right? And so, I think we are at that tipping point, and I see more and more fractional practitioners
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Marion: Doing great work out there. There's a ton of people in our network that are doing some incredible work, and I think that that is the way forward, because we cannot continue the way we are. We just cannot.
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Dr Jo Burrell: There's a danger, though, isn't there? If, if you don't have in-house HR, and it may be that, you know, you do have in-house HR, but you're still bringing fractional people in to do specific, you know, have specific roles.
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Dr Jo Burrell: But if you don't have internal HR at all.
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Dr Jo Burrell: If you… and you don't really understand HR and what it does, what they do.
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Dr Jo Burrell: then there's a real danger about not really knowing what you need. And I certainly find that in the wider workplace well-being field, that's a kind of perennial problem, is to get people who say, we want something, but they don't really know what they want or why they want it.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know? And sometimes they even have decided that they want something, but they haven't really got a rationale for it, and you're like, yeah, but why do you want that?
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Danny Gluch: They saw it on TikTok.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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Dr Jo Burrell: It's like, it's the latest thing, other people are doing it, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And it's very hard to have that conversation with an organization sometimes.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Because sometimes they've already decided, they're like, we want this, and of course, everyone's busy, so they want, you know, in a 10-minute conversation, they want to sign the contract and say, yes, we're going to do this, you know? They don't want to have that preliminary discussion.
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Dr Jo Burrell: about what's the problem, how do you want to address it, what's the best way of addressing it, you know, who do you need to address that problem, et cetera, et cetera. So that… I see that as being one of the issues.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Uncle.
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Dr Jo Burrell: HR being essentially something exter… a function that's external that you bring in on an ad hoc basis.
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Marion: Yeah, no, I mean, that, that's, that's, that's true. I also think it's the…
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Marion: curation of the work that we have to do and the way that it's often gone about that doesn't jive with our values. Again, if you go back to the type of people that…
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Marion: that gravitate towards this type of role. They're usually fairly principled, values-driven, cared about people, you know, want people to be… have equity, and… and, you know.
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Marion: The workplace to be accessible and fair, and all of this type of stuff, right?
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Marion: And when they're put in situations.
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Marion: regularly by the organization, which completely go against the grain of those things. I think that
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Marion: That is something that causes so much internalized damage. Like, I'll give you an example. Layoffs, I think, is a classic example. Many companies do not approach layoffs in a particularly ethical way, and guess who the bad guy is?
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Marion: Right? And I guarantee it wasn't your HR practitioner that made the decision, right? It was your CEO and your CFO and all of that, and they just had to carry the can in the end, and so they're villainized.
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Marion: And they are often having to deliver messages in ways that do not jive with their values, that do not jive with
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Marion: Professional standards, even?
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Marion: And then.
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Danny Gluch: That would make me depressed.
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Marion: Yes.
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Cacha Dora: I remember crying in one, years ago, you know, because I was so upset, because I did everything I could to not have that layoff happen, and I had no power over it, right? Like, at the end of the day, and I had a sense of responsibility and accountability to those people, and it…
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Cacha Dora: You can't control what you can't control, both internally and externally.
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Marion: Right?
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Cacha Dora: And… but Marian just kind of, like…
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Cacha Dora: kind of, like, really pinning it, right? Like, it's a personification. Yeah. It's like, that's really what ends up happening, and it is 100% unfair, but going back to what you said, Dr. Joe, is, you know, people…
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Cacha Dora: people scapegoat. They need a reason. They need… they need to label it somehow. We've been labeling things since…
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Cacha Dora: I don't know, human hair… human… human history. Like, we have… we have to label everything.
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Cacha Dora: And I think, unfortunately, that's just…
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Cacha Dora: I think scapegoat is a word I hadn't, honest to God, hadn't thought of, but makes so much sense with those statistics, because those statistics are just astounding.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And I think what you're talking about, Marion, now, is moral injury.
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Marion: Yeah, that's okay.
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Dr Jo Burrell: isn't it? It's like, actually, that's another source of the stress that people are experiencing in HR, is that they're put into positions where they're behaving in ways that don't… aren't consistent with their core values, and then that causes distress.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know that those decisions or those ways that you're acting are impacting people's lives and their livelihoods.
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Danny Gluch: Damn.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah. I think of… I think of the term disintegration, right? So, like, there's… this is integrated with who I am as a person and who I want to be, who I envision myself to be.
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Danny Gluch: yet I'm forced to do something that is not integrated. It's literally like a disintegration of yourself. And I, you know, when I think of disintegration, sort of like on a physics area, you think of, like, the lack of support, something's just falling apart. And I think our practitioners are falling apart.
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Danny Gluch: And, you know, we're trying to wrap up here, but what are some of the ways, you know, you co-founded Ultimate Resilience. What are some of the ways that HR as an industry can find better support and find some of the resilience so that we're not…
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Danny Gluch: Fallen apart all over ourselves.
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Marion: Danny, I was just about to jump in there and say, and it's not make us go on resilience workshops. If anyone suggests that, they're gonna get a punch in the face.
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Danny Gluch: Well, we know it's the wellness apps. We know I just need my 30 seconds of calm. Everyone.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Well, I mean, I think you touch on something really important, both of you, which is that I think to date, certainly in the UK, it feels like the conversation always reverts to self-care.
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Cacha Dora: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: I mean, I was at the CIPD Festival of Work earlier this year. There was a session that was specifically about HR wellbeing, and it focused solely on self-care.
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Dr Jo Burrell: you know, acts on… set better boundaries, make sure you have regular breaks, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I tell you, I was spitting feathers, and actually…
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Dr Jo Burrell: I could feel the tone in the room, and the tone in the room was kind of deflated. It's like… Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, there's no account taken here of the limited power we have
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Dr Jo Burrell: to create space for ourselves and to look after ourselves. And of course, we all have a personal responsibility, you know, to look after ourselves and for our well-being. There are acts that we can all engage in that are going to improve our well-being, and so we have to take some responsibility
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Dr Jo Burrell: But when it comes to workplace wellbeing, the organization has to take responsibility too. This has to be a joint project.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And actually, if you look at our report, what we talk about in terms of recommendations is a sort of three-level set of recommendations and things that… actions that need to be taken, and those are on the individual level, on the organisational level, but also at the professional level, at the level of the profession itself.
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Dr Jo Burrell: But one of the services that we're now offering to HR professionals is HR supervision.
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Marion: And we see that as very much a systemic.
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Dr Jo Burrell: you know, solution, and it's basically based on a model of support that we received as clinical psychologists all the way through our career. So when we train to be clinical psychologists, we train in the methods and models of supervision, of clinical supervision.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And we deliver it to our peers, and we receive it from our peers. And so it's a kind of sustainable system within… right across our profession, we get it regularly, all the way through our careers. And when we saw that there was this huge lack of support, this huge gap.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And of course, high levels of distress and difficulty amongst HR professionals. We just thought.
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Dr Jo Burrell: why aren't they getting supervision? Supervision is the answer, you know? I mean, you know, of course it's not the answer to everything.
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Dr Jo Burrell: But it certainly served me through my career incredibly well. You know, it's a place where I could learn the tools of my trade and techniques of my trade, but it's also… it was also a place where I could talk about the emotional impact of the work.
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Cacha Dora: And also, the challenges that I'm facing, the ethical dilemmas.
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Dr Jo Burrell: you know, the tricky conversations, the difficult dynamics that I'm dealing with. It was a space where I could reflect on and think about and resolve all of those, too.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So, that's what we are now delivering to HR professionals, both as a one-to-one and a group intervention, and we're working right across organisations, from public sector right through to big corporates.
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Marion: It's amazing, it's amazing work, and, like, when I came across this work, and when we first connected, it was just, like…
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Marion: It was just such a big breath that I could take to know that someone
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Marion: Could see what we were all going through, and someone was taking a step.
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Marion: to support us, and… and I'm so grateful to the work that… that you and your partner are doing, Dr. Joe.
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Marion: But we need more?
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Marion: And I think one of the biggest challenges that
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Marion: that… I mean, I can talk for myself. Like, when I've spoken to other HR professionals, even within my own org, my own orbit, whatever, and went.
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Marion: this sucks, like, no… when did anyone last check if we were okay? When did… you know, and… and there's just, like, a…
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Marion: Like, we ourselves don't expect anyone to ask if we're okay, because we're so used to just being, like, you know, treated as this silent, constant, stoic.
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Marion: hunchbag. And, you know, we're almost… I mean, is it Stockholm Syndrome? I don't know, right? Like, it's almost like that! Like, we're… we're so used to just being in this kind of constant state of
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Marion: distress.
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Marion: That we've almost stopped seeing ourselves as humans, in a way, and don't even realize ourselves that we need help. And when I hear, well, we have HR for HR, and I'm like, great, where are they? What are they doing? What do they actually do? Because, I don't know, none of them have ever came and said to me, hey, are you okay? What do you need? How can I help?
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Marion: Right? So, I think that this work is incredible.
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Marion: But we need more, and we need organizations, we need C-suites, we need CPOs, we need everyone to know about this work, and to say, do you know what? My HR team deserves that.
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Marion: They need it.
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Marion: Because if they're not good.
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Marion: We are not good. You can't pour from an empty cup. And so, there has to be more. Just more.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And actually, our data, you know, demonstrates that well-supported HR professionals
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Dr Jo Burrell: You know, are saving organizations huge amounts of money, too, because actually, our data shows that if you're… if you feel well supported in your… if you're in that small group of 13% of our respondents.
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Marion: Your mental health is better.
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Dr Jo Burrell: You're less likely to be thinking about leaving the profession, and you're much less likely to have taken time off sick as a result of stress or other related mental health issues in the previous year.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So in terms of retention, in terms of sickness absence, in terms of performance and functioning at work, businesses are saving money when they're supporting their HR teams well.
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Danny Gluch: That's wonderful.
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Danny Gluch: Knowing we have to wrap up, I'm just so happy that that's even an option, and…
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Danny Gluch: I imagine that that's gonna be news for some of our listeners, that, you know, HR supervision, this kind of support is an option.
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Danny Gluch: How, you know, as, again, as we wrap up, how would you suggest, someone who's in HR or in leadership bring up this conversation and start looking for, sourcing this kind of support for their HR team?
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Dr Jo Burrell: I think bring up the conversation by using our… the data from our report. I think data is very powerful. You know, numbers are powerful, because you can't ignore them. You know, when you're sharing an anecdotal experience, people can dismiss it as just you.
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Danny Gluch: But when you've got data that's based on lots of people, it becomes much more powerful. So I would say, please use our report as evidence.
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Dr Jo Burrell: That this is what's going on in HR.
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Dr Jo Burrell: And in terms of accessing support, I think that's the next thing. It's like, once it's recognized, you know, recognition is really important. Once you've got an organization to recognize that actually HR is a job that, you know, requires people are supported effectively.
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Dr Jo Burrell: It's a job where you're going to be experiencing high levels of emotional labour, compassion fatigue, burnout's very high, etc, etc. Once that's acknowledged, it becomes automatic in a way, doesn't it? Well, we've got to put something in place just to protect people, otherwise we're going to lose them.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: So, in terms of supervision, I don't know in the US if people are doing that. It's a relatively new service in the UK.
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Marion: Yeah. And I'm not aware of anyone else doing it apart from us, but do feel free to contact me. I'm on…
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Dr Jo Burrell: I'm on LinkedIn, Dr. Joe Burrell, if you want to contact me and have a conversation about, supporting you. But our plan going forwards is to actually start training HR professionals in supervision, and super.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Dr Jo Burrell: Approaches and techniques and models, so that they can then be delivering this to their peers.
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Marion: Yeah, I think that's amazing, and I just… As a practitioner who has…
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Marion: Cried in their car, and sobbed in the bath, and had panic attacks, and all sorts of things that have been triggered by really
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Marion: Tough, tough, tough work.
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Marion: expectations, and, you know, I just am so grateful for the work that you guys are doing. This research is just…
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Marion: the best thing that could have happened, and to bring this conversation to light. And, you know, we're huge advocates for the work that you're doing, so however we can help.
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Marion: Whether it's connecting you to people, or talking this up more in the US, we're all in, because there just needs to be more of this.
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Danny Gluch: There does. There does. And everyone, thank you so much for listening. You can find all of those links in the show notes, including the report. It's a free report. You don't have to pay to access it. It's fantastic. So use that as you're starting these conversations. Reach out to Dr. Joe.
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Danny Gluch: Start having these conversations. Spread the word that there is a better way to support our HR professionals. Leave comments in the show note, or in the.
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Marion: whatever, the LinkedIn post on how this is working for you, once you guys start doing it, that'll be fantastic.
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Danny Gluch: Leave 5-star reviews, remember to, like and subscribe. We'll see you guys next time.
