If you work in HR, you know that April is rarely a quiet month, and if you are the only HR person in your organisation, or part of a small team, you will feel that in the diary before you feel anything else.
The predictable and conflicting priorities such as the new tax year, payroll and employment law changes, performance review cycles and agreement of departmental budgets can all come at once. Then someone needs you to run the Stress Awareness Month campaign on top of all of it. This can take many forms from posters, infographics, emails, to arranging a webinar on a lunchtime that employees attend while eating at their desks.
You have watched this cycle more times than you can count. You know the limitations of it. You know that a poster about the five signs of stress does not address the reasons the stress is there in the first place. You know that a one-off workshop does not change a culture.
You know the difference between an organisation that takes wellbeing seriously all year round as opposed to one that takes wellbeing seriously during April only. The key part is that you are not the only one who knows this, chances are your employees do too.
If you are coming to the end of April realising that you have been working late into the evening or over a weekend trying to catch up, do not let the irony of that pass you by.
What is harder to sit with is that awareness without action is not just an organisational problem. It is a personal one too.
Most of the HR professionals I work with are not unaware that they are struggling. They know they are tired. They know they are not operating at their best. They know that the gap between the work they are doing and the work they want to be doing has been widening for longer than they would like to admit. Awareness is not what they are missing.
What they are missing is the space, the support, and sometimes the permission to do something about it. Stress Awareness Month is a useful prompt. As long as the prompt leads somewhere real.
For a lot of HR professionals, the honest answer to "what would actually change things for me?" is not a webinar or a breathing exercise. It is someone finally helping them work out whether what they are carrying is the job, or something else, or both — and what to do about it either way.
If that question landed somewhere for you, it was supposed to. That is where it starts. If you're ready to talk - get in touch.
Hi I'm Sue!
I have worked in HR for over 20 years, specialising in learning and development, training and as a…
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