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JoDee Curtis (00:02)
HR are many times viewed as the caretakers of the organization, but yet who takes care of HR?

Welcome to The JoyPowered® Workspace Podcast, where we help HR and business leaders embrace joy in the workplace. I’m JoDee Curtis, owner of Purple Ink, an HR consulting and talent development firm, and with me is my friend and co-host, Susan White, owner of Susan Tinder White Consulting, an HR consulting practice. And Susan is also an executive collaborator with Purple Ink.

Our topic today is burnout in HR: understanding it, preventing it, and overcoming it. Susan, we’ve had lots of requests in the past, and we’ve talked about just burnout for employees in general. But we actually had many listeners who had requested this topic on specifically burnout in HR.

And I thought it was interesting that really this issue touches almost every HR professional at some point in their career. And it’s an important topic for all employees, but consider that HR professionals are many times viewed as the caretakers of the organization, but yet who takes care of HR?

So we’ll start by grounding ourselves a little bit in what burnout actually is. And the World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress not successfully managed with three different dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy.

Susan White (02:17)
Translation for HR: You’re drained, you feel detached or negative about your work, and you doubt your impact. Not good. I’m thinking about in my own career — I don’t know JoDee, if you ever felt like you hit burnout.

I think as I was going through burnout a number of times, I never knew that’s what it was. I knew there was periods of terrible stress and I know that I was just, like, operating on fumes. And I didn’t think to myself, maybe I’m burned out. Maybe I need to do something different. Instead I was like, I gotta get through this. I mean, this is… But as we look at that definition, I became more cynical during those times. You know, I’m sure I was exhausted and I could not have been operating at my A level. I just couldn’t have been. So I look back at those periods and I kind of wish I had a label for it or I wish I had thought maybe there’s something I ought to do about it.

JoDee Curtis (03:11)
Right, right, I feel exactly the same. And some of those specific root causes we see again and again for that is the first one, always on crisis management. If you think of what HR is dealing with these days — layoffs, restructures, investigations, compliance deadlines — HR absorbs the anxiety of the organization in any of those situations. And in SHRM’s 2025 findings, the top drivers for that include heavy workloads, compensation pressures, and poor leadership.

Susan White (03:57)
Yeah, I can remember years where when I worked in this large organization that there were no raises or no raises for the client groups that I supported or no raises for those of us in HR at a certain level and different things. And yet the pressure kept coming on, the demands kept coming on and you just — all those things are stressors that are gonna hurt. And there’s always a crisis. There was no shortage of crises, right?

So let me give you a second one that comes up a lot that causes a burnout. When you’re understaffed, you’re over capacity, when you’re really asked to do things that you feel are unreasonable. SHRM’s State of the Workplace analysis summarized by HRdive.com showed that 62% of HR pros feel like they work beyond capacity and 57% say their departments have at some point or other been understaffed.

JoDee Curtis (04:51)
Yeah, yeah, that’s tough. You know, I think too HR deals with a lot of emotional labor and confidential issues, right? So they carry the employees’ tough stories, the employees are coming to them with their burdens and hardships, which is, you know, a part of the role at times, but as different than other employees’ role, HR can’t always vet those details or talk to other people about it due to confidentiality. And it can create a sense of isolation around it. They’ve taken on all these heavy stories.

Susan White (05:39)
I think that is so real. To this day, there’s situations or stories that I was involved in that still haunt me, right? That still weigh, right? I mean, just really tough, tough issues. I think when people go into HR, they’re thinking, I’m gonna have a happy job. I’m gonna do the people side of business. My gosh, you got the whole business of people and it is not always pretty. Yeah, for sure.

So the fourth potential root cause, which we see happen, can spur burnout is role sprawl and legal risk. An HR role might include being a recruiter, a coach, a mediator, benefits analyst, compliance officer. And if you make mistakes in some of those areas, it can carry real legal implications. You very well may be drawn into litigation from a past employee or current employee or an applicant who wanted to be an employee but didn’t get in, right?

JoDee Curtis (06:37)
Right.

Susan White (06:38)
Yeah, no wonder your nervous system always stays on. You’re always thinking about the potential risk or downside of an action that either you take or one of your employees takes.

JoDee Curtis (06:52)
Yeah.

Susan White (06:53)
So zooming out, global stress is high. Let’s think big picture here. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace found 41% of employees report a lot of daily stress, with poor management amplifying the problem. HR lives at the intersection of that management reality. So when your employees feel like there’s stress and managers aren’t doing a good job at seeing it and addressing it and you’re in the middle, employees are coming to you manager. They’re coming to you. You’ve got that all of a sudden. You’ve got more than your own stress. You’ve got the organization’s stress.

JoDee Curtis (07:31)
Yeah, I do think that word intersection really hits home with me in thinking about the times where that exact scenario was happening. The employees were coming to me about the manager. The manager was coming to me about the employees. You know, I saw things from both sides, right? And it’s very tricky, very tricky.

Susan White (07:55)
Yeah.

JoDee Curtis (08:00)
So, yeah. And one kind of guardrail we can think about too is that psychological safety. The American Psychology Association’s 2024 Work in America reports links to psychological safety with better performance and fewer negative outcomes, which includes emotional exhaustion.

And if your organization lacks psychological safety, it’s likely that the HR team gets squeezed the hardest, right? Because that puts them in that intersection again.

So what are some things that HR professionals can do to prevent your own burnout? Well, the evidence says burnout is largely about the system and not individual willpower. And I found this interesting, right? Because I think we, whether you’re HR or not, a lot of times we seem to take the blame on things ourselves, right, and think, you know, what am I doing? What did I say? But in an article from Harvard Business Review titled “Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People,” they cite a 2019 Gallup survey which found the top five reasons for burnout are unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, a lack of role clarity, a lack of communication and support from their manager, and unreasonable timelines.

Now that survey was about all employees, not just HR professionals. But again, HR are experiencing those, as you just mentioned earlier, as well. And then all the employees who are experiencing them might be coming to HR as well. So many times we’re trying to treat the individual and not the organization.

So here are some ideas to change the system of the process, right? So one is to set boundaries and rethink your calendar. Consider scheduling meetings in shorter timeframes. I know, I think a lot of us learned this during COVID, right? That we used, at least I used to default to those 60-minute meetings, but now I set expectations for shorter timeframes. I send a lot more meeting invites for 30 minutes or 45 minutes or even sometimes 20 minutes.

Schedule time to not be interrupted while you work on something like an investigation or a compliance issue, which really needs more — or may need more focus time to work on them. And then schedule open door hours for drop-ins and ask others to schedule time on your calendar to avoid that walk-by crisis.

And I know for some people that, you know, those can be tough adjustments. We may think of ourselves as HR, we need to be open to the people or we need to be available, but that’s what’s causing a lot of burnout there too.

Susan White (11:42)
I think that’s very fair. Love that term, “walk-by crises.” Yeah, they happen to see you and all of a sudden they dump a crisis on you. What? I’m gonna stop walking down that hallway.

I think the other thing I would just say about the boundaries is that I think that HR folks, if you’re listening and business leaders, if you’re listening, okay to say no. Give yourself the permission. Just because it comes to you doesn’t mean that is your problem. Don’t. Don’t be the receiving end of everyone else’s problem. There’s going to be times where you need to redirect to somebody else or back to the individual. Yeah, you don’t need to be everyone’s dumping ground for their issues that they may have created. So, good.

Here’s a second idea. Implement more self-service to allow employees to do more for themselves. This was really popular in the early 2000s, to do, do more self-service, to have employees do more self-service. I think we’ve gotten away from that. And I think it’s important to go back and take a look at what is HR still doing or providing that we need to have managers and employees do more of, automating things, using systems or software where employees can change their address, select their benefits during open enrollment, any type of life changes that happen.

What can our brokers, our benefit providers, payroll services, what can they help us automate so that there can be self-service accessibility? FMLA, PTO, time requests, consider any other actions that are administrative in nature. How can we try to use automation to streamline and get us out of the explaining, handling, and doing stages? Approvals can be built into a lot of those things.

We don’t need to be a stop on the way for compensation. Let’s just put in the salary, salary recommendations. Maybe at some point we can pull reports, take a look, figure out if there’s any issues, but we don’t need to be a step in a process that I see happen a lot in organizations that we’re first level, second level, third level approvers. So where can we streamline?

JoDee Curtis (13:56)
Yeah. Right. And somewhat similar to that or along those lines of streamlining, thinking about utilizing FAQs or videos or checklists and tips. Put them in intranet or central easy to find locations that employees can go to on their own to get help on policies or to reduce repeat questions.

Maybe it’s something in a newsletter if people still have them or somewhere to cut down on the number of questions, which can be better for the people too, right? That they can get those immediately and maybe not have to wait to talk to someone in HR.

Susan White (14:36)
Yeah, excellent. You’re exactly right. And you know what? Sometimes when you do your FAQs or have kind of a database where people can go to get answers that you sometimes have to get those employees who love calling you or coming by to see you. You’re going to sit down with them and show them where the answers are. Maybe you do that a couple of times because it’s just easier to ask JoDee. No, Dan, we’re going sit down together and we’re going to navigate to the place where that answer is. Yeah, that’s great.

Number four, when you think about ideas, our fourth one is psychological safety and really manage your enablement. For example, set up weekly reminders to ask yourself, what is blocking me? What did I learn this week? What am I working on that I don’t need to be working on? What is the big projects I need to do that I should be working on? Maybe you just have a weekly huddle with yourself to prioritize, reprioritize things.

Secondly, give yourself grace. Respect your time off, set your boundaries, and then hold those boundaries. If you feel real burnout and you see yourself just not performing at the level you want to, maybe you contact your EAP. Maybe there’s a counselor or somebody you want to talk to to help get you back and rebalanced.

And then modeling psychological safety in public and in private forums. It’s okay to say you don’t know. Let’s find out. Normalize asking for help. Don’t feel like you have to keep saying, yes, yes, yes, putting everything on your shoulders, being the Iron Man who’s going to go solve the problem. Let others see you be vulnerable. It’s going to help them be vulnerable.

JoDee Curtis (16:31)
Yeah. Number five is capacity and prioritization. So sharing with leaders and business partners, what is on your plate? What are your goals? What are your priorities and what is your bandwidth? So, you, you want your goals and priorities to align with theirs as well too, but sometimes we have particular things we’re trying to accomplish as well too. And just having conversations about those do they’re not thinking, you know, you’re not doing anything for me lately. What are you working on? So that they know, right?

And cross training your HR team to allow for additional help in certain areas when needed. Maybe at particularly hectic times of the year during, if you have a performance evaluation time period or open enrollment, to think about having temporary staffing or outside HR consultants or fractional HR to get help when you know it’s going to particularly busy. And leaders often say yes to those things when the trade-offs are quantified, right? So if you can say this is how many hours I need help. And I know we don’t always know those, right? But maybe we get them one year and we calculate the hours and we know what they are so we know what to ask for the next year.

Susan White (18:07)
Good thinking. And the sixth and final idea is plan recovery time. Think about, could you have 45-minute meetings? You have 15 minutes between your meetings to use that restroom, to grab a refresh on your water, to stretch, to just clear your mind, check in with someone. I know that the days that I just have meeting after meeting after meeting and I’m not refreshing, I’m not bringing my A game and I’m more likely to be… I’m not necessarily burned out, but on the road to being burned out.

So think about, well, how do I carve out some time so that I can breathe between encounters? Schedule lunch sometimes outside with friends or colleagues or a walk, but you’re going to have a walking meeting with someone so you get out and have a fresh perspective. Those times you can get away from the desk might give you some R & R that you need that helps stave off that burnout.

JoDee Curtis (19:06)
Yeah, yeah. Now those were some prevention techniques. But what about those of you who might already be in burnout stage, right? You might feel like getting out, you know, you wish you had prevented them, but you didn’t or, you know, for whatever reason, you’re in that state. Let’s talk about some ideas to get you out of it.

One thing is to briefly maybe inventory your top three stressors and your top three supports at work. What are the issues, the activity, the people maybe who are causing you the biggest stress and what can you do about it? And then also thinking about your three biggest support systems you have. You know, maybe that’s your team, maybe that’s your boss, maybe it’s a coach or somebody that can help you through those stressful moments.

And think about, am I using those supports? I know even just thinking about delegating work… sometimes, I feel like delegation is one of my greatest skills, but sometimes I’ll get myself into a rut where I’m like so busy, I feel like I don’t have time to delegate, right? I need to take time to train someone or get out of that. So how can we mesh those support systems with our stressors?

Susan White (20:37)
Yeah, that is a great idea. Ask for help, as we talked about, permanently or temporarily, trusting in the psychological safety of the organization you’re at. You know, if you’re feeling burnout, go into your boss and say, I really feel like I’m at a burnout stage and I don’t want to be. I care too much about this organization. I care too much about you. I care too much about my clients. But I’m over capacity. Saying the words out loud.

JoDee Curtis (21:09)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And consider finding a mentor or a coach. And maybe that person is inside or maybe is outside of your own organization. But take time to take care of yourself or to get some ideas from those people on what you can do.

Susan White (21:32)
When you feel like you can’t afford to take any break or take any time, that should be a warning signal to you that I need to take a break and take some time off. And that is just stepping up and walking away and locking the door behind you and doing something for yourself. And I know that sounds really, really hard, but it’s, you’ve got to, I want to say, I want my voice in your ear. Get up, walk away from that desk, lock the door. It’ll still be there tomorrow, and tomorrow it will be tomorrow’s issue.

JoDee Curtis (22:02)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hear that so often that people say — and I have been one of those myself — like, I don’t have time to take a break. I don’t have time to take a day off or whatever, but you know, when you do, it works, right? You think it doesn’t work, but when we’re so caught up and working so much, we’re just not effective.

Susan White (22:11)
Me too. Yes. It does work. You’re not thinking as clearly. You’ll come back with a, hopefully, better brain.

JoDee Curtis (22:37)
Yeah, yeah. And you know, this idea might not be a possibility for many people, but if it is, consider changing seats, right? Can you rotate a position within the HR team for a period of time, maybe spending time in recruiting or training or employee relations that might help give you a new focus on some of the issues that are happening in the organization or learning a new skillset which might empower you more in other aspects as well too.

Susan White (23:17)
That’s great. And then remind yourself what it is that you enjoy about your role. It doesn’t hurt to do a quick — and we talked about, you know, the three supports you have at work. What attracted you to your role? What are the things you really love? And you know what? Sometimes it’s reminding yourself, big picture, why I want to be doing what I’m doing. Now, if you’re so burnt out that you don’t can’t think of anything anymore, maybe it’s time to make that change. But I’m going to guess that you’re going to, you’re going to at the core love that job, it’s just that we’ve got to fix some things around it.

JoDee Curtis (23:49)
Right. I think too that when, you know, if you go to get help from a boss or a business partner or whoever that might be, try to use some data when speaking to other leaders about it, right? It’s one thing to go to someone and say, I’m burnt out, I’m exhausted, I’m not being effective right now. I mean, those things might all be true and need to be shared too. But maybe trying to put it into some numbers of, know, I worked 60 hours for the past three weeks, or I think if we could get some temporary help in here for 25 hours a week for the next three to four weeks, that we can get through this, right?

So trying to use some solid data or some formulas or some estimates from prior years or whatever to get a feel, to give them a feel for what is it you’re asking for? How much help, how much money is this going to cost to get you feeling better and caught up on some things?

And thinking too, along those lines about what is the right size for your HR team. We learned just in our previous podcast about that, you know, we had said for years that you should have one HR person for about a hundred employees. And now that is in some SHRM surveys telling us that number is closer to two now. So, you know, using some of that data to say we need to hire more people or here’s what we’ve taken on in the past six months. Some of those things too.

Susan White (25:54)
I love that point because I think most managers if you come to them and say I’m just so burnt out, I just don’t know where to go, they’re as lost as you are, so if you can come in there with, say, here’s some ideas that I think would help, help us, help me, help the organization, that’s a beautiful thing. You may be so far down you can’t see the path forward. I get that. But if you can, if you have some ideas, sharing them I think is going to be appreciated by your leadership.

JoDee Curtis (26:19)
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe investing in manager training could be another option as well, which could alleviate issues and conflicts that are coming to you that maybe could be better dealt with by the manager. Maybe on them giving better feedback, setting better expectations, handling conflicts, lots of different leadership skills that they might be passing the buck to HR that increases your workload when they really could be taking some of those on.

We gotta understand that burnout is not a personal failure. It’s a signal. You mentioned that earlier, Susan, that it’s a signal that we need to listen, act, and protect our own well-being or those of our HR team members. And if today’s episode helped with that, share it with an HR friend who needs it.

Susan White (27:24)
Very fair. JoDee, what’s one small step people can do in this area, do you think, to create more joy at work?

JoDee Curtis (27:33)
Well, I’ve talked about this many times on the podcast, but I think understanding our strengths, right? What is it that we do well? And you mentioned the step about reminding yourself, why am I in this role? Where do I find joy in this role? And what do I do best? And any time that we can focus more on what we do best, we’re more productive, we get more done, we find more joy in what it is we’re doing. Understanding who you are and what you’re best at, and then advocating for yourself in those areas as well too.

Susan White (28:20)
Yeah, very fair. JoDee, we have a listener question. The following question came from one of our listeners to a prior episode. “How do you create a balance with personal relationships in the workplace and keep yourself HR professional?”

JoDee Curtis (28:38)
Yeah. So I thought this was, I mean, this really did come from one of our listeners, but I’ve had a couple of conversations in the past month with people about this. I’ve heard — well, one in particular, I’ve heard people say for years that as HR professionals, that they not connect with other employees on social media, because maybe sometimes we learn too much about people that we don’t want to know. So I’m not necessarily advocating for that. I’m just saying some people have a rule. I know lots of HR people who have a rule about that.

I also was talking to a friend who leads HR for an organization and she was telling me that she was hiring someone new in HR and told them that one of the expectations was that they not have any kind of personal relationship with employees of the organization. And I mean, they wanted them to be a good client service provider and have a positive professional relationship, but no personal relationship.

And she’d actually interviewed someone for the role that she was very interested in hiring and then she told them this rule and the person said, you know, I love everything else about this role, but that doesn’t work for me. She said, I’ll be moving to the area and what, you know, I anticipated that I would be making friends at work to, you know, start. Yeah. And which I think is very reasonable, but this HR leader felt very strongly she had been burned a couple of times.

Susan White (30:36)
Oh, I was gonna say, I bet there’s a history on that,

JoDee Curtis (30:39)
Yeah, yeah. And I just thought that was very interesting. Again, not that I’m not advocating for that one personally, but, but I do think that we have to define clear boundaries sometimes that I think it’s okay to build authentic relationships, but set professional limits, right, to be transparent about our roles and our responsibilities so that colleagues understand when you’re speaking as a friend versus as an HR professional.

I think we also have to be consistent and fair, right? To treat all employees equally and consistently in applying policies. And if a situation, it happens that involves someone you’re friends with or close to, maybe consider stepping away from it or seeking a second opinion to avoid a bias that people might think we did something differently because we were their friend.

And, you know, kind of going along with what I said earlier about being transparent, we may just need to specifically communicate that we value relationships, but that at work sometimes as HR professionals, we need to be neutral on issues. And maybe even saying something like, I care about you as a colleague, but I also need to ensure fairness and compliance. And of course, confidentiality is just a non-negotiable, right?

Susan White (32:25)
Right.

JoDee Curtis (32:25)
You should never be sharing sensitive information with others. And using empathy. Sometimes we might need to say, I understand this is hard or difficult or might not meet your needs, but here’s what the policy allows us to do here.

And then I think, you know, it’s always been important for me to have an HR network and HR mentors so that we can discuss challenges with other HR professionals, maybe who are inside or outside the organization, because we can feel isolated at times. But I don’t think it’s that we can’t have friends either. Yeah. Any different thoughts on that, Susan?

Susan White (33:15)
That’s great. I like everything that you said. I do believe that HR people are under such scrutiny from management and employees about our objectivity. And if you are known to be a relative of someone in the organization or a good friend or that’s who you have lunch with, you’ve got to be even more super careful than you would ever be about anything you talk about.

I mean, really, if somebody finds out where the company picnic’s gonna be, and they happen to be a friend of yours, and they start talking about it, it hurts, it hurts credibility. So I think all of your advice is really, really good, but you’ve gotta be even more diligent than you would be, or vigilant than you would be if it’s somebody that you’re friends with in the organization. About confidentiality, yeah.

JoDee Curtis (34:05)
Yeah. Great. I agree. Now it’s time for in the news. Released on December 1st, 2025, Resume Now’s AI trends for 2026. And I suspect we’re going to be — we talked a lot about AI in 2025, and we’re going to be talking a lot more about it in in 2026.

Susan White (34:28)
Yes.

JoDee Curtis (34:32)
But this particular report brings together eight studies conducted in 2025 amongst thousands of US workers and employers, revealing how AI has evolved from a buzzword to a staple in the workforce. And some of the things they found, 97% of workers have asked chatGPT for advice instead of their manager. That is crazy. 97% of anything, right, is crazy. Yeah.

Susan White (35:03)
Whoa! That’s very scary.

91% of employers report using AI to hire and 73% say time to hire has improved since implementing AI. I have to believe that they’re using AI as part of their employment process. Certainly applicant tracking systems, HRIS systems that have AI built doesn’t surprise me. I’m sure they’re not using AI to make the hiring decision, but as a component of their process for sure.

JoDee Curtis (35:27)
Yes. Right. And that’s only natural too. Right? Yeah. 84% believe AI makes it easier to find a job and 68% of workers have used AI to write resumes. And, you know, I think people get nervous when they hear there’s so much AI in the hiring process, but I think this is an important statement too. It may make it easier for recruiters, but it’s also making it easier for the job seeker too. So that can be…

Susan White (36:17)
Yeah, and it can be technology for good. It’s helping narrow and laser focus the right candidate for the right jobs. It can be very much technology for good. It doesn’t surprise me that 68% are using AI as part of their resume building. But you know what? That’s why it’s more vigilant, or important for the hiring manager to really authenticate people’s work experience and through really good behavioral interviews and reference checking. And finally, one in three, or 34% of workers say that they would prefer to report to an AI manager. That makes me laugh.

JoDee Curtis (36:46)
Yeah. I think that one is hilarious. Yeah. We still need people, folks. But the data does highlight how AI is transforming job hunting, leadership, pay, pay and trust at work, showing a workforce learning to balance optimism and anxiety as automation reshapes how people find jobs, manage teams, and define value. Yeah, I like your comment though, Susan, think of it as using it for good, right? It can be good for everyone if used correctly and properly and ethically. So yeah.

If you’re SHRM certified, you can get credit for listening to this episode. To get the code, go to getjoypowered.com slash SHRM and fill out a short evaluation. When you finish the evaluation, you’ll get the code and a link to a proof of participation certificate. The code will expire on February 23rd, 2027. Again, that’s getjoypowered.com slash SHRM to get the code, which will expire on February 23rd, 2027. Thank you for listening and thank you for your dedication to the HR profession.

Tune in next time and as always, make it a JoyPowered® day.

Susan White (38:41)
Thank you.