We’ve all seen it – high-performing and hard working employees who are being battered by the corporate machine. A botttomless pit of emails, a team that needs clear, strong leadership, stakeholders who are ever hungry for results and in the middle of it all often a single – highly-capable – individual who is standing in the corporate sea letting wave after wave crash into them.
While corporate overwhelm is often framed as an individual’s inability to “cope,” it is, in reality, a systemic issue. Workload, culture, and leadership behaviours all contribute to the storm employees find themselves in. I think HR professionals can play a pivotal role both as an advocate for the employee voice but also as an architect of organisational practices that can reduce the tide of overwhelm in the first place.
Using a coaching approach to shift from firefighting to prevention: Too often HR is pulled into managing the symptoms of overwhelm: increased attrition, sickness absence, performance dips or managing conflict. But the real value comes when HR influences the root causes. Coaching leaders and managers to set realistic goals, embedding healthy boundaries around working hours and supporting managers on how to spot early signs of burnout in themselves and their teams. In doing so, HR can help shift the organisational culture to “lets all perform at a high level in a healthier way”.
Creating cultures of permission: A key part of HR’s role is to legitimise conversations about wellbeing. Employees may see asking for support as weakness or fear that admitting they are struggling will harm their career prospects. HR can counter this by equipping managers with language, frameworks, and safe spaces that normalise these discussions. Whether it’s embedding wellbeing check-ins into one-to-ones or championing leaders who role-model boundaries, HR has the chance to set cultural “permissions” that ripple across the business.
Data as a compass: Employee surveys, attrition trends, absence records, and exit interviews all hold valuable signals about where overwhelm is spiking. Recent experience has shown me that shorter, regular and more targeted engagement check ins can act as a compass to identify and manage pressure points before they become crises. For example, tracking workload hotspots in a particular department might highlight the need for resource planning or process redesign. This evidence-based approach helps HR shift from intuition to impact.
And what about HR professionals who are themselves overwhelmed? Increasingly, as a career HR Business Partner, I have observed HR professionals carrying the emotional weight of the organisation – providing a well of time and empathy for stretched leaders, managers and employees – but often with very little time and resource themselves to process this. In order to strengthen the resilience of the profession (as we evolve our approach more broadly to wellbeing at work), I wonder how much networking, buddying and supervisions systems should form part of the HR profession. This already exists in other professions, such as advocacy, where you bear witness to a high volume of emotional labour and may prove crucial as organisations lean on the HR profession to solve the deepening issues with corporate overwhelm. Without boundaries and support mechanisms of their own, the profession risks modelling the very burnout it is trying to prevent.
