Is Human Resources Stressful?

I've conducted, by my count, about 85 termination conversations in eleven years. That's roughly eight per year. Some are performance-based, where the person saw it coming and the meeting is mostly a formality. Some are layoffs, where the person did nothing wrong and the meeting is about money. And some are misconduct, where the person is angry and the meeting is about containment.

The one that stays with me is from about two years ago. A machinist on second shift, a guy named Phil who'd been at the company for 14 years. He failed a random drug test. Company policy is zero tolerance. There's no discretion built into the policy. Positive test, termination, done. I'd been advocating internally for a year to change that policy to include a rehabilitation option, because I'd read the data and second-chance programs have better outcomes for both the employee and the company. The policy hadn't changed yet. It was still in committee when Phil's test came back.

So I sat across from Phil and his union rep, a woman named Dolores who's been a steward for twenty years and has seen everything. I read the termination language. Phil started crying. Not yelling, not arguing. Crying. He said his wife had cancer and he'd been using marijuana for anxiety because he couldn't afford the copay on his Lexapro after her medical bills. He was self-medicating because the healthcare system we enrolled him in didn't adequately cover the mental health care he needed while his wife was dying. And I terminated him anyway. Because the policy said so. Because I don't make the policy, I enforce it. Dolores looked at me and said nothing. She'd seen this before. That's why she said nothing.

I went to Margot, my director, the next day and said the policy needs to change. She agreed. The policy changed six months later to include a rehabilitation pathway. Too late for Phil. Every termination since, even the ones I agree with, I think about Phil. That's the stress. Not the volume. The residue.

There's a meme that goes around LinkedIn every few months. It says something like "HR is not your friend. HR protects the company, not you." And every time it shows up, I die a little inside. Not because it's wrong, exactly. There are HR departments that function primarily as legal shields for management. I've seen them. But the meme flattens a complicated reality into a slogan, and that slogan makes my job harder every day.

I work for a healthcare system, about 4,200 employees across three hospitals and a network of outpatient clinics. I'm one of six HRBPs. My portfolio is the nursing and clinical support staff at the main campus, roughly 700 people. When a nurse has a problem, whether it's a scheduling conflict, a manager who's retaliating, or a coworker who's creating a hostile environment, they're supposed to come to me. But about half of them don't, because they've been told, by the internet and by coworkers who had bad experiences at other companies, that HR will side with management.

Last month, a charge nurse named Yvonne came to me about her director. She said the director was consistently scheduling her for the worst shifts after Yvonne had raised concerns about patient safety protocols in a unit meeting. Retaliation, basically. Yvonne sat down in my office and the first thing she said was "I know you're probably going to tell me to drop it." I said "I'm going to listen to what happened and we'll figure out what to do." She was surprised. Visibly surprised. It took her about ten minutes to relax enough to actually tell me the details. We opened an investigation. The director's scheduling patterns showed a clear change after Yvonne's meeting comments. The director was counseled and the schedule was corrected. Yvonne thanked me afterward and said "I didn't think HR actually helped people." She's been here nine years. Nine years believing the institution that's supposed to protect her wouldn't.

That's the stress. I'm doing the work. I'm investigating, I'm advocating, I'm correcting. But I'm doing it against a background of institutional distrust that I didn't create and can't fix with individual cases. I fix Yvonne's schedule and she tells two people. The meme reaches 40,000.

I am the only HR person at this company. Ninety-five employees. One me. I report to the COO, a woman named Patricia, who is supportive but does not have an HR background and cannot, by definition, understand the weight of what I carry because she doesn't carry it. She carries P&L stress. Budget stress. Client stress. I carry people stress, which is different because people stress has faces.

The isolation comes from the confidentiality. I know that the creative director, who everyone loves, is on a final written warning for behavior his team has never seen because it happens behind closed doors. I know that two employees in the media buying department are dating and haven't disclosed it, which technically violates our conflict-of-interest policy, and I'm waiting to see if they disclose before I have to address it. I know that a junior copywriter submitted an ADA accommodation request for ADHD and that her manager, who does not know about the request, has been complaining to me about her attention to detail. These are not abstract HR scenarios. These are people I eat lunch with. People I see at the holiday party. People who ask me about my weekend and don't know that I spent part of that weekend drafting the written warning that will go to the creative director on Monday.

I can't talk to my coworkers about the hardest parts of my job because my coworkers are the hardest parts of my job. My best friend at work, Janine in accounts, she sometimes says "you look stressed, want to grab a coffee and vent?" And I say "just busy" because I can't vent. Venting requires disclosing, and disclosing violates the thing that makes my role functional. So I smile and I say "just busy" and I go back to my desk and I draft the warning in a Word document with no names in the file name, because even the file name could be a breach if someone sees my screen. My therapist, Dr. Choi, is the only person who hears the unredacted version. She charges $180 a session and my insurance covers 60%. The remaining $72 per session is, functionally, the cost of doing this job without losing my mind. I've spent about $3,744 on therapy this year. I consider it a professional expense.

My job, if I described it structurally, is to sit between two groups with fundamentally different interests and make both of them feel heard while serving the one that signs my paycheck. That's the impossible middle. I work for the company. My job exists to reduce legal risk, manage talent, and support business outcomes. But to do my job well, I need employees to trust me enough to bring me their problems, and trust requires them to believe I'm acting in their interest. I'm acting in the overlap. There's a Venn diagram where employee needs and business needs intersect, and I live in that overlap. The stress comes from the cases where the circles don't overlap at all.

Two months ago, a district manager in our retail ops, a woman named Gloria who oversees 11 stores in the Midwest, came to me and said she wanted to terminate a store manager who had been underperforming for six months. I reviewed the documentation. The documentation was thin. Two verbal conversations, no written record, no PIP. Gloria wanted to skip the PIP and go straight to termination because, in her words, "I don't have three more months to wait while she figures it out." I told Gloria that without a PIP, a termination creates legal exposure, particularly because the store manager is over 40 and could file an age discrimination claim. Gloria said "so you're telling me I can't fire someone who's bad at their job?" And I said "I'm telling you we need to document the performance issues and give her a formal opportunity to improve before we can safely terminate." Gloria was furious. She saw me as an obstacle. The store manager, meanwhile, if she knew this conversation was happening, would see me as the person who's building the case to fire her.

Both of them are right. I am both the obstacle and the case-builder. I'm protecting the company from Gloria's impatience and I'm facilitating the store manager's eventual exit if she doesn't improve. That's the middle. It's not a comfortable place. My wife, Kim, asked me once who I'm loyal to. I said "the process." She said that sounded lonely. She was right.

I have spent more of the last three years on return-to-office policy than on any other single initiative in my career. More than compensation. More than benefits redesign. More than DEI programming. Return-to-office has consumed approximately 30% of my bandwidth since 2023 and I am not exaggerating.

The CEO, Mitchell, decided in early 2024 that we were going back to the office four days a week. He didn't consult HR on the employee impact. He announced it in a leadership meeting and then turned to me and said "Lorraine, let's roll this out by April." I had six weeks to design a policy, communicate it to 550 employees, handle the exceptions and accommodations, and manage the backlash. The backlash was immediate and sustained. We lost 14 people in the first three months, most of them in their 30s, most of them in roles where remote work was perfectly functional. The cost of replacing those 14 people, using our average cost-per-hire of $12,000 and an estimated productivity loss of $15,000 per vacancy, was roughly $378,000.

I presented those numbers to Mitchell. He said "culture requires presence." I said the data suggests otherwise for knowledge workers. He said "I've been in financial services for 30 years and I know what works." I learned two things from that conversation. First, that data loses to conviction at the executive level more often than HR textbooks admit. Second, that my job is not to win arguments with the CEO. My job is to present the information, make my recommendation, and then execute the decision whether or not it aligns with my recommendation. That second lesson is the one that stresses me. Not the policy. The execution of a policy I believe is wrong, with a smile, because the alternative is insubordination or resignation, and I have a mortgage and two kids at Myers Park High.

The part that keeps me up is the accommodation requests. We've had 23 formal accommodation requests related to the RTO policy. ADA accommodations for employees with documented disabilities that make commuting or office presence difficult. Each one requires an interactive process, medical documentation, a manager conversation, and a decision. Some are straightforward. Some are in a gray area where the medical documentation supports partial remote work but the manager wants full compliance. I spend about four hours per week navigating those gray areas with our employment attorney, Samantha, who bills $425 an hour. The company's legal spend on RTO accommodations alone this year is approximately $48,000. I included that number in my quarterly report. Mitchell did not comment on it.

I conduct every exit interview at this company. We've had 31 voluntary departures in the last 12 months, which is a turnover rate of about 22%. I've sat with all 31 of those people, usually on their last Friday, usually in the small conference room by the kitchen, and I've asked them why they're leaving. I take notes. I code the responses into categories: compensation, management, growth opportunity, work-life balance, culture, other. I compile a quarterly report. The report goes to the VP of People, Sandra, and the CEO.

Of those 31 departures, 18 cited their direct manager as a primary or contributing factor. Eighteen. That's 58%. I identified three specific managers who appeared in multiple exit interviews. One manager appeared in five separate exit interviews over nine months. Five people left, at least in part, because of one person. I put this in the report. I bolded it. I made a chart. Sandra read the report and said "this is helpful, let me discuss with leadership." I don't know what happened after that discussion. What I know is that the manager is still here, in the same role, with the same team, and two more people on his team have updated their LinkedIn profiles in ways that suggest they're looking.

The stress isn't the exit interviews themselves. Those are actually the most honest 30 minutes I get with anyone at this company, because people who are leaving have nothing left to lose and they tell you the truth. The stress is that I collect the truth, synthesize it, present it with data and recommendations, and then watch it disappear into a leadership conversation I'm not part of. I'm the messenger. The message arrives. Nothing changes. And then in three months, I'm back in the small conference room with another person from the same team, hearing the same story, taking the same notes, and I know already what the report will say. The Sisyphean part isn't the interviews. It's the reports that nobody acts on. My roommate Kurt, he's a data analyst at a biotech company. He says his reports sometimes get ignored too. I told him the difference is that my reports have names and faces and the reason someone's seven-year-old is going to have to change schools because Mom got a job in another city to get away from a manager we could have coached or moved or fired. That's not a data point. That's a life I documented and couldn't change.