Editorial
What do human resources professionals and hairdressers have in common? People in both professions are intimately familiar with the unwritten rule that they must serve as therapists for their clients. From divorce to family feuds and loss of loved ones, clients spill all as they get settled into the salon chair. No wonder then, mental health in hairdressers is suffering; 65% of hairdressers have experienced anxiety, burnout or depression during their career.
Likewise, HR practitioners are also privy to the most difficult conversations in their businesses. In working with employees daily, they often serve as the first line of defense in spotting mental health challenges including suicidal thoughts and ideation, and signs of domestic violence. When you add a global pandemic, climate disasters, geopolitical tension, record inflation and economic uncertainty, layoffs, the never-ending return-to-office debate and the emergence of AI into the mix, it’s no surprise that a whopping 98% of HR professionals report feeling burned out.
What Is Vicarious Trauma?
While therapists receive training on the art of leaving work at work, HR professionals (as well as hairdressers) do not. Unbeknownst to them, HR practitioners may find themselves experiencing vicarious trauma — the ensuing effect of being exposed to another person’s trauma. The symptoms of vicarious trauma include but are not limited to exhaustion, anxiety, irregular sleep, decreased sense of purpose and difficulties with personal relationships.
In addition to vicarious trauma, which results from helping others through trauma and stress, experts also believe that those in caring professions are experiencing compassion fatigue — a sort of numbness that can result from the physical, emotional and psychological impacts of helping others.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant likes to think of it as empathic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help. However you choose to characterize it, one thing is clear – the state of the modern workplace has never been more uncertain, and the pace of change continues to accelerate. Organizations are increasingly looking to their HR functions to serve as a beacon of stability, care and compassion in an increasingly uncertain and unstable world.
What happens, however, when the very people who are tasked with caring for employees don’t receive the care they themselves need to keep going? To whom does HR turn when they need support and are burning out under the pressure of these burdens? If you’re a senior HR leader or CHRO and you suspect your team is experiencing the symptoms of vicarious trauma, consider taking the following steps:
1. Connect Talent Strategy to Business Strategy
Too many leaders still think of HR as a support function, instead of a strategic one on which growth hinges. Connecting people outcomes to business outcomes to demonstrate the value of HR will not only help get leaders get on board with the talent agenda, but will also result in better HR effectiveness and wellbeing.
In companies with high levels of alignment between HR and executives, the C-suite is twice as likely (65% vs. 32%) to recognize that a positive company culture leads directly to better business outcomes. Moreover, C-suite engagement is critical to HR teams’ wellbeing. Research shows that HR teams that aren't aligned with the C-suite are 59% more likely to feel overwhelmed and burnt out and 25% less likely to feel fully engaged with their job.
Related Article: Managers Are Not Okay. Here’s How You Can Help
2. Build a Community and Support System for Your Team
Paradoxically, working in HR is lonely. HR leaders must encourage their teams to network outside of their organization and even consider joining one of the many HR professional communities dedicated to helping the HR function excel. Joining an external network or community can be tremendously helpful not only in navigating business and people challenges but also in sharing best practices.
Too often, HR practitioners get buried in the day-to-day fire drills of supporting their business and lose focus on the bigger picture. From peer-reviewing ideas and serving as a sounding board to benchmarking best practices and learning from one another, a community of like-minded professionals can help widen your HR teams’ horizons, create a sense of belonging and purpose, accelerate their development and help with that excruciating feeling of isolation and overwhelm that vicarious trauma invariably invokes. Moreover, professional communities can help members learn and foster necessary resilience skills, which continue to gain importance in a world where the pace of change, and in turn the demands on HR leaders, only continue to intensify.
3. Make the Invisible Work Visible
So much of what HR does is invisible work. Creating safe spaces, fostering psychological safety, coaching leaders and showing compassion and care to all levels in the organization are all components of their work critical to the health and culture of organizations. Not to mention the daily and delicate balance HR must strike between meeting the needs of the business and the needs of people. The world’s most admired companies attribute 30%-50% of their market value to culture.
Quantifying the efforts that go into building and sustaining great cultures makes the value of HR visible and showcases the impact of professionals in a function that has faced radical change over the past four years. The work of HR teams deserves to have its moment in the sun.
4. Prioritize Self-Compassion and Self-Care
Putting on your own proverbial oxygen mask before helping others is now more important than ever before. Without proper self-care, HR teams are unlikely to show up as their best selves for colleagues; as executive coach Dina Smith noted, “self-care boosts resilience, and when you’re leading a team through this uncertain and stressful world, it’s mission critical.”
The need for self-care and self-compassion is exacerbated by the new-to-world challenges faced by HR teams today. In the absence of a playbook that clearly outlines how to design hybrid workplaces or leverage AI to improve talent outcomes among other challenges, HR teams find themselves experimenting with and testing solutions. Just as product and engineering teams test new products with clients and pivot based on market response, HR leaders must get comfortable with the idea of pivoting and learning from experiments that didn’t work. This shift in mindset will require HR to demonstrate the same compassion and kindness they show to others in their organization. If you’re an HR leader reading this, you too are subject to these pressures. Be sure to practice plenty of self-compassion and self-care to fill your cup so you can show up for your teams.
Related Article: Workers Are Stressed. Here's How Companies Are Responding
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Addressing Vicarious Traumatization
Supporting others is a high contact sport. If you’re in HR and experiencing vicarious traumatization,remember that there is nothing wrong with you. If anything, it demonstrates that you are an empathetic human being in the right profession. We may not be able to solve others’ trauma, but we can continue to make people feel seen and heard. As we put the human back in human capital, we need more, not less, compassion. It’s only through highlighting the great work of HR teams, practicing compassion for self and others, and building strong communities that HR can continue to forge ahead in designing the workplace of the future.
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