It is Really Easy to Feel Inadequate in HR. Don't.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good” ~ Voltaire
I was in conversation with a group of HR professionals a few weeks ago. Some were discussing leaving the HR profession. Everyone had anecdotes of fellow practitioners who had bailed out of the HR profession over the last year. Others who had been furloughed, were planning to leave the profession and pledging not to return. It seemed that 2020 did them in.
We commiserate and we get it.
One practitioner said that the abuse he had taken during the last year working through the COVID crisis, was beyond the pail. From inconsiderate managers who expected the world but enabled little to nothing, to stressed employees juggling work and personal lives, new safety procedures and business changes - this practitioner said he had seen enough and was done. He expressed that he wanted to be in a different profession where people were at least grateful for the work he did.
I found myself consoling at first but then I had to shift my stance from living too much in the pain with them. Usually as HR practitioners, we have a healthy dose of skepticism and travel with our sense of humor, but some of my fellow professionals were expressing real aggravation. I moved on and started to acknowledge with each of them how much they had actually accomplished over the last year. So rather than being overwhelmed by what they felt was a lack of gratitude we shifted the focus instead on what had been accomplished, how much HR was needed and how much they had been relied on to help both leaders and employees make sense of an ever changing environment. I reminded them that the trying times were not yet over and although it is really easy to feel forgotten and inadequate in HR, there are plenty of reasons not to be.
I often tell people that I am really an operations person at heart who happens to know HR. I have explained it over the years using a hospitality analogy. Blame that on my experience in the airline/travel industry where I became very comfortable not being able to please everyone. I explain by saying that when we walk into a well designed hotel lobby where the tables, floors, and fixtures are sparkling; fresh cut flowers are perfectly appointed and in the right place, amenities exactly where we need them and a welcoming front office staff, we don’t see the operations, but we feel and experience the result. In other words, we don’t know when or how the standing order was made with a local florist for the fresh flower arrangements to be delivered, we didn’t hear the discussions behind the employee uniform selection and we were not a part of the architects’ discussion on the color scheme. We just showed up and it was done. We showed up and they were ready for us.
That’s how I see the operations behind HR.
Our employees and colleagues only know the medical plan works. They don’t see the hours we spent advocating for expanded wellness services because it became more important than ever during the pandemic. Employee wellness services work because HR has laid the foundation. Payrolls show up. Training and development arrive just in time because employee and business needs were anticipated while HR constantly audited, reflected and reorganized.
We know, from years of practice, that many of the rewards from being a HR practitioner do not materialize in the moment. As HR professionals, we must be in synch with that delayed gratification or we will drown in the feeling of inadequacy. Without personal confidence in our abilities and our work, we will fall into disrepair as practitioners.
Why? There is so much that people complain about when it doesn’t go well. When it doesn’t work, there is a list of naysayers ready to list what HR did and didn’t do well. If you are in HR you already know that everyone thinks they can do your job. I believe that is because they don’t see most of it. As practitioners and operators behind the scenes, we can’t join the chorus of beating up on the HR professionals because the only thing that gets talked about is what did not happen. Remember that while one person is over here complaining, there are others whose needs we anticipated and met before they even acknowledged there was a need.
How many of us have hired great people and watched them blossom, grow and move on to do amazing things? How many of us put programs in place, measured and saw the positive impact on employee satisfaction and employee experience over time? How many managers and leaders have we groomed, coached into better leaders, taught to have difficult conversations and open their eyes to the value of their people? How many budget decisions have we impacted and how many organizational changes have we shepherded from technology rollouts to policy development? How many departments have we consolidated or shepherded through change? How many business continuity initiatives did we help to shape just over the last year. Many. Yes, we can count the failures too - The managers we couldn’t work with, the projects that failed because of a lack of resources (people, time or money) and the role we played in it.
Our responsibility as HR practitioners is to acknowledge our own value, know where we can improve, build our own skills and be confident about the fact that HR is ready to do the do the work, is doing the work and will continue to do the work to realize organizational vision. A Thank-You might be great for a minute, but if we don’t get it, that is not a failure of HR. Don’t take on a feeling of inadequacy just because no one showed appreciation. We don’t need that additional burden since our plates are full with real work.
When organizations work well it’s because HR showed up, quietly breaking down silos to get things done. We know that. Others might not. We can spend time telling them or we can just keep working to make sure our employee experiences improve and we are making a positive contribution.
Bottom line is that it is easy to feel inadequate because you will not hear words of gratitude everyday. Some days we will feel like all our experience didn’t matter as we run into a situation we hadn’t experienced before. Our roles might remain unseen, but know that we are every much a part of that bottom line from talent to development to planning to strategy to change management to operations!
Finding your joy in HR is not easy, but necessary. Put a line through that feeling of inadequacy because it is not a part of your agenda! We have work to do. Take breaks. Rejuvenate yourself and come back. Use some of those wellness services we have in place and talk to a fellow HR practitioner who can pull you back from the edge and remind you of your worth!