Who Is Holding the People Who Hold Everyone Else?
This is Part 2 of a post I started on LinkedIn. If you missed it: I began my career in HR, burned out dealing with warring City of London financiers, left — and never stopped thinking about people. The HR Mental Wellbeing Report 2026 brought it all back.
About the Report
The HR Mental Wellbeing Report 2026 is produced by Ultimate Resilience, a UK-based organisation founded by Clinical Psychologists Dr Felicity Baker and Dr Jo Burrell, in partnership with employee benefits consultancy Everywhen. Now in its third year, it draws on nearly 3,000 responses from HR professionals. The data is UK-based — but if you work in HR anywhere in the world, I'd wager it feels uncomfortably familiar.
Three years of research. Nearly 3,000 HR professionals. And the numbers barely move.
Around three-quarters experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression. Burnout affecting the majority. Only 13% feeling genuinely supported at work. This isn't a post-pandemic hangover. It is the baseline condition of a profession quietly asked to absorb everyone else's pain — with nowhere to put their own.
One observation from Perry Timms, Chief Energy Officer at PTHR and one of HR's most recognised thinkers, stopped me:
"HR is not just operationally stretched, it is psychologically burdened. We are no longer looking at individual resilience gaps; we are looking at a profession designed to absorb organisational strain without sufficient release, recognition or redesign."
Designed to absorb. That's not a people problem. That's a structural one.
HR Is Not One Thing
Here's what my own experience taught me — and what I think gets missed in these conversations:
When I was in HR, I was navigating disciplinaries, counter-grievances, and the elaborate interpersonal warfare that only truly bored, overpaid City of London financiers have the energy to sustain. I wasn't bad at it. But it was draining me in a way that felt fundamental, not circumstantial.
It took me years to understand why. I wasn't built for that version of HR. I was built for a different one.
Some HR professionals are energised by the fight — the tribunal, the complex case, the difficult executive. They find conflict clarifying rather than corrosive. Others — and I am firmly in this camp — are energised by the lift. The development conversation. The person who doesn't yet know what they're capable of.
Both are legitimate. Both are needed. But when you spend years doing the version of HR that depletes you rather than fuels you, burnout isn't a risk. It's an arrival.
The report shows 38% of HR professionals are considering leaving the profession. I'd be curious how many are in the wrong corner of it — not the wrong profession entirely.
The Police Force No One Asked to Join
There's another layer to this that the report doesn't explicitly name but that every HR professional will recognise instantly.
HR is frequently cast as the organisational police force. The function employees approach with suspicion, assume is acting for management, and brace themselves against — even when the person sitting across from them got into HR precisely because they care about people.
This creates a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn't appear in any job description. You're trying to help, genuinely, and you're doing it through a fog of mistrust you didn't create and can't easily shift. The employee in the room has already decided what you are before you've opened your mouth.
And it's compounded by the nature of when HR gets called in at all. Rarely at the good moments. Mostly when things are already broken — redundancies, grievances, investigations, crises. HR is handed the difficult conversation, the bad news, the situation nobody else wanted to deal with. They rarely get to be the hero. They get to be the messenger.
What makes this harder still is that HR is far more internally diverse than the outside world appreciates. Talent acquisition, learning and development, organisational design, reward, employment law, employee relations, wellbeing, EDI — these are genuinely distinct disciplines requiring different skills and different temperaments. Larger organisations have the luxury of letting people find their lane. Smaller ones collapse it all into one or two people and call it a generalist role, which is its own particular kind of impossible.
The point is that "HR" as a label flattens all of this. It flattens the diversity of the work, the diversity of the people doing it, and the very different ways those people experience the toll of it. When we talk about supporting HR, we need to be talking about all of it.
Who Is Asking HR the Right Questions?
HR professionals are extraordinary at asking other people the questions that matter.
What do you need? What's really going on? What would good look like?
They ask these in performance reviews, wellbeing check-ins, redundancy meetings. They hold space for others as a matter of routine.
Almost nobody is asking those questions back.
This is where coaching can make a real difference — not as a crisis intervention or a tick-box benefit, but as a consistent space where someone is finally asking the HR professional the questions they spend all day asking everyone else. Where they get to put things down. Where a boundary doesn't feel like a failure. Where being the one with needs is, for once, completely normal.
A Note to Organisations
You wouldn't expect your finance team to operate without financial systems. But you may well be expecting your HR team to manage the emotional complexity of your entire organisation on goodwill alone.
The report is unambiguous: 66% of unsupported HR professionals are considering leaving, versus just 7% of those who feel well supported. That is not a marginal finding. That is an enormous signal.
Ask your HR team what they need. Then do something about it.
The people side never left me. What I found eventually was coaching — the version of this work I'd always been looking for. The part that builds people up and stays with them long after the conversation ends.
Not everyone in HR needs to leave to find that. But many need someone to finally ask them the right questions.
If that resonates — I'd love to talk. deerosecoach@gmail.com
