HR leaders were once considered administrators and paper pushers—but no longer.
Over the past few decades, the role has transformed to include things like succession planning, AI implementation, and leadership development. The pandemic accelerated that trend, pushing CHROs to a higher-status position within the workplace, something that’s reflected in their growing paychecks.
“If you had told me that in 2020, I would have been juggling an antitrust review for a major acquisition, a divestiture, a global public health crisis, a full shift to remote work, an economic tightening of capital markets, an American questioning of the racial justice system, and then the lowest unemployment rate that would last for two more years, I would never have imagined it," Colleen McCreary, chief people officer at data streaming giant Confluent, who worked at the time as CPO of Credit Karma, tells Fortune.
But experts say that years of increased responsibility without a surge in resources has also made practitioners feel they have to tackle one massive challenge after another. That’s led to widespread feelings of burnout among CHROs, and it could be building to an upcoming exodus.
“This is the first time in years that collectively, the function is just worn out,” Paul Wolfe, leadership expert, author, and former CHRO at Indeed, Match.com, and Conde Nast, tells Fortune. “I always thought my job was tough because there’s so much subjectivity to it. But now, people in HR are really burnt out.”
More problems, same money
A series of major labor force shocks have kept HR departments busy over the past few years.
When the COVID-19 pandemic upended traditional workplace arrangements, HR teams were front and center of the transformation, tasked with keeping everybody safe and productive during uncertain times. Coming out of the pandemic, they had to navigate the Great Resignation and quickly figure out how to attract and retain as many people as possible.
Today, their roles have expanded to include a variety of new responsibilities they never had before, like training and development, as well as organizational restructuring. Many CHROs are also managing return-to-office mandates, caught between their CEO’s demands for a bustling office and employee desires for more workplace flexibility. These new responsibilities are in addition to their traditional tasks, like meeting performance metrics and trying to look out for worker well-being.
“The last several years have been really trying for HR professionals, and there's no end in sight,” chief people officer of HR tech company Lattice, Gianna Driver, tells Fortune. “I would even say we should anticipate that the rate and level of change is going to remain constant, if not increase and crescendo.”
But critically, CHROs say they’re not getting more resources to handle their increased workloads. That’s left many feeling trapped between what the C-suite expects of them and what they’re reliably able to deliver. “I think many of us in the HR space would agree we have been asked to do more with less,” Driver says. “If you look at the percentage of our budget as a percentage of the overall, I think over the years, we see statistically that that has been a smaller percentage.”
Around 30% of HR leaders expected budget cuts in 2024, and 30% expected their budgets to remain the same despite a growing list of HR responsibilities, according to a Gartner’s HR Budget and Efficiency Benchmarking survey released in May. Those numbers are up from last year, at 29% and 26%, respectively. And both stand in stark contrast to 2022 when only 12% of teams said they expected budget cuts that year and 22% expected their budget to remain the same.
“There’s increased demand, but not really a lot of additional resources to try and meet that at any given time,” Piers Hudson, senior director for Gartner’s HR practice, tells Fortune. And he doesn't expect this trend to change anytime soon. “HR teams are still struggling to split off more transactional work from the more proactive, value-adding work they'd like to be doing more of, and that’s going to continue to be a big challenge for them.”
The main reason for this lack of budget is the perception by other departments that HR is inefficient, says Hudson, and has struggled with integrating technology quickly, something that has become particularly important with the dawn of AI. That kind of ingrained idea can affect whether or not the C-suite provides HR teams with more money.
“I think there's kind of a perception from the wider business that transformations around technology haven't always gone terribly well for HR,” says Hudson. “There's this hesitancy from the CFO, for example, to kind of throw a lot of more resources at HR until the team can show that they’ve got their processes smooth and streamlined.”
That’s why it’s crucial, he adds, that CHROs and their teams start using AI technology to take over more menial tasks. They should also start measuring the return on investment of ongoing HR initiatives, find ways to reduce budgets for burdensome tasks, and reallocate funds to areas that support business growth and talent retention, the Gartner survey points out.
“The business side has to be ready for HR to play a slightly different role,” says Hudson.
More problems, same money
Years of toiling under heavier workloads with uneven resources are taking a toll on HR workers.
A whopping 71% of respondents say burnout among HR staff is more challenging than pre-pandemic, according to a February 2023 survey from consulting firm Gartner. Additionally, more than half of the HR leaders surveyed reported increased difficulty in both retaining and recruiting employees on their teams.
During the pandemic, turnover for the role spiked to an all-time high of 28%, according to the latest CHRO turnover index from Russell Reynolds Associates. That number dropped drastically to 11% in 2023, but some experts expect it to pick up again.
Patrick M. Wright, a professor of management at the University of South Carolina, says a number of CHROs he’s worked with have announced their retirement over the last three months. He adds that many HR professionals who had to “give up their lives for a few years” aren’t jumping at the bit to take on another massive organizational change, like a return-to-office mandate. And while they may not say it publicly, he believes heavier workloads are likely having an impact on longtime executives’ decision to retire.
“My guess is that a year from now, we'll look back at the turnover among CHROs this year and find that it was kind of at an increased rate relative to past years,” says Wright.
Some prominent CHROs have decided to leave the workforce this year. Nike human resources executive Monique Matheson, for example, who joined the company in 1988 and has led its HR arm since 2017, announced her retirement in November. After four decades with the business, chief human resources officer Eric Minvielle will retire from Mars at the end of this year, and after 16 years with Johnson & Johnson, CHRO Peter Fasolo plans on doing the same. Tim Huval, chief human resources officer at health insurance company Humana, is retiring this January after 12 years at the company. Delta Airlines executive Joanne Smith is also set to retire from her position as chief people officer after 22 years at the company. And Ellyn Shook, the CHRO of Accenture, who’s been a mainstay at the global IT services and consulting firm for more than 36 years, announced her retirement in August of this year.
“Many of my more experienced peers have decided to retire or move into fractional work or consulting,” says McCreary. “With some of the lowest voluntary attrition in years, a lot of companies don't feel as big of a need to invest in their employees or the teams to support them; therefore, HR teams are being asked to do more with less."
In order to keep both herself and her team on track, McCreary says she focuses on remembering their broader mission and carefully prioritizing their duties. That helps ensure her employees feel energized by work and confident in taking on larger projects.
“The burnout rate is real,” says McCreary. “It's a big emotional ask to be on the front lines.”
