Who HR’s the HR? Why People Teams Need Support Before The Crisis Hits

It’s common practice to wait until the house is on fire before calling HR. Treating the people team like an IT ticket for behavioral problems guarantees they only step in when things are already falling apart—and take the brunt of the emotional load. With burnout and engagement dominating workplace conversations, the setup exposes a glaring structural irony. The professionals tasked with building a company’s support system are usually operating without one of their own.

Ruhul Saiyed has watched the pattern play out across both global multinationals and scrappy tech environments. A CIPD Level 7 qualified HR specialist, Saiyed is an HR & Internal Communications Advisor at Global Healthy HR. Drawing on hands-on operational experience, such as managing the relocation and integration of over 90 employees across a dozen countries at British American Tobacco, she notes that many organizations simply do not think systematically about how to support their own people-professionals.

“HR is there for every team, every manager, and every employee. We handle their quarterly meetings, their training, their travel needs, and even the fun leisure moments. But what about HR?” Saiyed points out the persistent gap in corporate design that puts strain on HR teams. Many organizations expect HR to orchestrate everything from compliance training to company culture without providing a dedicated support system in return. But for the executive everyone relies on, the lack of internal care quickly becomes overwhelming.

• Hosting, never toasting: The job often means planning events you cannot actually enjoy. “We create training systems for all the employees, but there is nobody there to curate a training session for us,” she explains. “We never have those leisure moments like a Christmas party or a quarterly get-together to bond with our own team, yet we are always organizing them for everyone else.”

• Running on fumes: Endless stress without a safety net eventually breaks a team’s capacity to care. “We are constantly overloaded with stress, and at a certain point, we just don’t care about anything,” she says, adding that HR teams often face higher burnout rates than marketing or communications because they rarely receive the support they give out.

• Penny-wise, people foolish: Companies still treat HR as a dispensable cost center, making people teams the first on the chopping block when budgets tighten. When examining the root causes of employee burnout, financial devaluation ranks high. Consistently under-resourcing teams creates the exact conditions where empathy fatigue takes hold. “If they want to cut the budget or reduce headcount, they cut it from the HR team first,” Saiyed notes.

To fix the imbalance, organizations should consider HR’s capacity earlier in their growth journey. Younger startups often provide a useful blueprint. In those environments, founders typically bring HR in from day one to design the “backstage” infrastructure—policies, forms, and organizational design—long before a crisis hits. By adopting a new operating model for people management early and tracking current HR trends, companies build a foundation that not only survives fast-paced growth but shifts HR from a reactive, high-stress environment to a strategic role that takes care of problems before they ever surface.

• Day one: Abandoning a human-centric focus often fractures trust between employees and the people operations team. Employees assume HR only cares about protecting the business, increasing friction in the process. Repairing that skepticism starts the moment a new hire walks through the door. Effective professionals use the first day to prove their dual loyalty, recognizing the many purposes of the onboarding process. Because poor onboarding can slow down integration and damage trust, Saiyed favors a highly proactive approach. She pairs a standard comprehensive new hire checklist with early, informal connection. “If they do not have a good experience with onboarding, they automatically think that HR is not capable or that they don’t care about them,” she explains.

• Coffee and culture: Saiyed bypasses bureaucracy by stepping in immediately after the interview phase to assist with logistics like immigration and vetting. “We would take them out to a cafe on the premises to interact informally with everyone,” she says. “It is a highly effective way to make new hires comfortable with the team and allow them to genuinely experience the company culture.”

• Coaching out bad habits: The same philosophy of early, low-stakes communication applies to management. One of the most valuable things an HR partner can do is coach leaders out of unhelpful habits before they escalate into larger retention problems. Maintaining high employee engagement relies heavily on emotional intelligence and consistent touchpoints. To support the effort, Saiyed recommends managers hold regular, interactive one-on-one meetings and keep their people partners informed the moment friction surfaces. “Have a thirty-minute session with them, talk to them, see what they’re struggling with, and see if they have any suggestions,” Saiyed advises. “Training is one of the main things to equip managers with the skills they need to keep their team going and to not get into toxic manager habits.”

Proactive practices like clear onboarding, regular check-ins, and simple communication habits all help reduce the pressure that eventually leads to HR burnout. But professionals also need a dedicated space to step out of the caregiver role entirely. Saiyed recalls a straightforward initiative from a previous role where the entire HR team went out to a restaurant every three months to decompress. The only rule was that work topics were strictly off-limits. Saiyed concludes by saying that it’s important HR teams connect to support one another in a variety of ways. “Bonding with people across different teams and understanding their struggles, their happy moments, and the things they genuinely enjoy makes a lot of impact in people’s lives.”