International HR Day: What we're actually celebrating

Today is International HR Day. It is observed every year on the 20th of May, and it exists to recognise the contribution that HR professionals make to the organisations they work in. There will be posts today celebrating the profession, thanking HR teams, and acknowledging the work that goes largely unseen, and all of that is right and good.

But I want to take a slightly different angle, because if you are an HR professional reading this, I suspect you have a complicated relationship with being celebrated. You are used to being the one who holds things together, and considerably less used to anyone asking how you are doing in it.

So this year, alongside the celebration, I want to say something honest about what this profession actually asks of the people who work in it.

What International HR Day Is

International HR Day was established by the European Association for People Management to shine a light on the strategic value of HR and the people who deliver it. Each year has a theme, and the day is observed across countries and organisations of all sizes.

At its best, it is a prompt for organisations to reflect on what they are asking of their HR function, and whether they are giving it what it needs to do the job properly. At its most common, it is a LinkedIn post from a CEO who has not spoken to their HR Manager in a fortnight.

I say that not to be cynical, but because the gap between how HR is spoken about and how HR is actually experienced is one of the most important conversations our profession is not having loudly enough.

What the Research Says

The statistics on HR wellbeing make for uncomfortable reading. According to research cited by Sage, 95% of HR leaders find their role overwhelming due to excessive workload and stress, with 84% frequently experiencing stress and 81% reporting feelings of burnout. Separately, research from Personio, reported in People Management, found that two in five people professionals say their workload is unmanageable, with a third believing their responsibilities will only increase over the next five years.

The profession is describing itself in those numbers, and it is worth sitting with that for a moment.

What It Actually Feels Like

The pandemic changed HR permanently, and not always in the ways that were promised.

For a period, HR moved from the margins to the centre. Organisations that had never thought carefully about their people suddenly needed someone to navigate furlough, redundancy, remote working, and a workforce experiencing collective trauma. HR professionals stepped up, often without additional resource, without precedent, and without anyone asking how they were holding up while they held everyone else together.

What followed was not a return to normal. The scope of HR expanded and stayed expanded. Wellbeing, hybrid working, culture, retention, leadership development, and an increasingly complex employment landscape all became permanent fixtures on a list that was already full. The expectation that HR could carry all of it, and carry it quietly, largely remained.

For HR professionals in smaller businesses, this landed particularly hard. There may be a small team with limited capacity to absorb the volume, or not team at all. There are no peers at your level to share the thinking with, and a very small if any buffer between you and every request, crisis, or question the organisation brings to your door. You are making decisions that should be pressure-tested with someone who understands the field, and instead you are making them alone.

The days are reactive. The strategic work your organisation genuinely needs keeps getting deferred. The work that drew you into HR in the first place keeps slipping to the bottom of a list that only gets longer. This spiral leads to what the research is showing that HR professionals are overwhelmed which can lead to burnout.

What It Costs the Business

When HR is overwhelmed, the effects do not stay contained within the HR function. They move through the organisation, like a ripple in water, often in ways that leadership does not immediately connect back to the pressure their HR professional is operating under.

Strategic people work gets deferred, and then deferred again, until it quietly disappears from the agenda entirely. The initiatives that would genuinely improve how the organisation attracts, retains, and develops its people never quite get off the ground, not because nobody wants them, but because the person responsible for leading them is too busy managing the volume of what is already in front of them. Leadership starts to lose confidence in what HR can deliver, often without understanding why the gap exists.

Decisions get made without the people expertise they need. Employment matters are handled under pressure, without the space for proper consideration, which increases risk. Culture drifts, because the person best placed to notice and address it does not have the capacity to do anything but react.

The HR professional at the centre of all of this, the one keeping everything moving, absorbs the consequences of a structure that was never designed to be carried by one person. The longer that continues, the harder it becomes to change, for them and for the organisation.

A business that genuinely values its people cannot afford to have its HR function running on empty. The two things are not separate problems.

What This Day Could Mean

International HR Day is worth marking. HR professionals do work that matters, work that shapes culture, protects people, and when there is space to do it properly, genuinely changes organisations for the better.

But marking the day well means being honest about what the profession is actually experiencing, and what it needs. The celebration matters, and so does the recognition, the support, and where it has not happened yet, the permission to stop carrying everything alone.

To every HR professional reading this: I see you. I see the decisions you made alone, the conversations you held for everyone else, and the things you quietly absorbed so that others did not have to. You are appreciated, genuinely, even if the people around you have not found the words for it lately.

If any of this has felt familiar, I would genuinely like to talk. I work with HR professionals in small and medium-sized businesses who are exactly where you are, capable, committed, and running on less than they should be. The conversation is not about learning to be more resilient or managing your time differently. It is about understanding what is actually going on, so that you can make changes that last.

Happy International HR Day. You deserve more than a post.