By Charlette Pomme

HR Carries More Than We Realise:
The Hidden Emotional Load of HR

When people talk about workplace wellbeing, the focus is usually on employees.

How do we reduce stress?

How do we improve engagement?

How do we support mental health?

They're important conversations.

But there's another question I don't hear asked often enough.

Who is supporting HR?

Over the last year, I've spent more time working with HR professionals, and one thing has become increasingly clear.

Their job isn't simply about policies, procedures or compliance.

It's about people.

And people are wonderfully complex.

In any given week, an HR professional might support someone through bereavement, help resolve conflict between colleagues, navigate a difficult performance conversation, respond to concerns about mental health, or help a manager work through an employee's long-term absence.

They hold conversations that most of the organisation never sees. It’s just the nature of the role. 

It reminded me of something one HR professional said in the 2026 HR Mental Wellbeing Survey:

“You are so busy supporting everyone else that HR usually gets forgotten about.”

I think that sums up something we don’t talk about enough. There’s a lot of focus on the support HR provides, and much less on the impact that providing that support can have on the person doing it.

The emotional side of HR rarely gets talked about

When we think about demanding jobs, we often think about long hours or heavy workloads.

But there is another kind of demand that is much harder to measure: Emotional load.

It's the accumulation of difficult conversations, the responsibility of staying calm when someone else isn't, the pressure of making fair decisions when emotions are running high, and the awareness that every conversation has the potential to affect someone's livelihood, confidence or future.

Most HR professionals know those emotions aren't theirs to carry.

Knowing that, however, doesn't always stop them going home thinking about the conversation they had at three o'clock,  wondering whether they could have said something differently, or feeling emotionally tired without really knowing why.

We notice workload. We don't always notice emotional load.

One of the things I find fascinating is how easily emotional labour goes unnoticed.

If someone spends eight hours lifting heavy boxes, we'd expect them to feel physically tired, but if someone spends eight hours moving between conversations involving conflict, anxiety, grief, frustration and uncertainty, we rarely acknowledge that this requires energy too.

Yet our nervous system doesn't separate emotional effort from physical effort quite as neatly as we'd like to believe.

Every conversation asks something of us,particularly when we care.

That emotional load is showing up in the data too. The 2026 HR Mental Wellbeing Report found that 62% of HR professionals were at high risk of burnout.

This is where Emotional Intelligence becomes practical

Emotional Intelligence is often misunderstood, people think it’s about being more empathetic, but that is not often something HR professionals need help with. Most HR professionals I meet are already very good at caring about people and reading the room. 

The challenge is something else:

How do you remain compassionate without absorbing every emotion in the room?

How do you stay present with someone else's distress without taking it home?

How do you recognise when your own body is telling you that you're carrying too much?

Many consider this a matter of personality, but these are skills, and like any skills, they can be learned. 

I've found that when people begin paying attention to their own emotional patterns, something shifts:

• They notice tension earlier.
• They recognise when they're becoming emotionally overloaded.
• They become more aware of what belongs to them, and what belongs to someone else.

. They are the same caring person, but they become more aware.

Caring doesn't have to mean carrying

This is probably the biggest misconception I come across. That if you stop carrying everyone's emotions, you'll somehow care less.

In reality, I've found the opposite to be true.

When people aren't overwhelmed by the emotional weight they're holding, they're often able to listen more clearly, think more objectively and stay present for longer.

They're still compassionate, they're simply not exhausted by it.

HR belongs in the  workplace wellbeing conversation too

We spend a lot of time thinking about how organisations can better support employees. HR is often the team making that support possible.

They are in the conversations most of the organisation never sees: grief, conflict, performance, absence, mental health, difficult decisions and all the emotion sitting underneath those things.

That asks a lot of a person and yet this training is not part of a HR degree.

HR is expected to bring empathy, professionalism and good judgement to each of those conversations, sometimes several times before lunch.

Workplace wellbeing needs to include space for HR to process the impact of that work too. Yet only 13% of HR professionals say they feel well supported when it comes to their own mental wellbeing at work.

For many organisations, HR has become an emotional anchor.

If HR is going to keep holding space for everyone else, they need somewhere to put the emotional load of the role too.