Wellbeing Support for HR Managers

Wellbeing support for HR managers: when the caretakers are running on empty

In many organisations, wellbeing now has all the visible trappings of progress. Nearly three-quarters of respondents to the CIPD’s 2025 Health and wellbeing at work report say employee wellbeing is firmly on senior leaders’ agendas. Fifty-seven per cent have a stand‑alone wellbeing strategy, up from 44% in 2020, and line‑manager “buy‑in” has climbed to 75%. HR teams are central to this shift. Public sector HR managers report spending around 18% of their working week on mental health initiatives – almost a full day dedicated to other people’s wellbeing.

Yet the people carrying this agenda are themselves under strain.

The PSHRA mental wellbeing survey shows more than half of HR professionals say their role has negatively affected their own wellbeing. Workload (78%) and burnout (75%) are the leading drivers of mental health concerns. This is emotional labour at scale: restructurings, grievances, safeguarding issues and crises, week after week. It is not just tiring; it is cumulative.

That strain is not staying neatly contained at work. Fifty‑six per cent of HR respondents say their mental health concerns have impaired their professional performance. Eighty‑three per cent report inhibited sleep, and a quarter say workplace stress is affecting personal relationships. For a function expected to model composure and judgement, these figures are more than uncomfortable – they point to a structural risk. When the people you rely on to design and police wellbeing policies are themselves running on empty, both credibility and quality of decision‑making are at stake.

The complication is that HR are simultaneously heavy users and gatekeepers of wellbeing narratives. They champion resilience, self‑care and psychological safety for the workforce, while internal norms of professionalism, neutrality and confidentiality quietly signal that they should absorb moral strain as “part of the job”. This distinction matters.

The PSHRA data shows a stark reluctance to seek help. Among HR professionals whose wellbeing has been affected, 53% say they have not sought any mental health support – up from 41% in 2021. In parallel, only around 24% of staff in their agencies use available mental health resources at all. HR is investing more time in wellbeing, but the people closest to the system are increasingly hesitant to use it.

Why? Many HR leaders understand exactly how counselling services work – 43% of employers now offer access to counselling, often alongside phased returns and reasonable adjustments – but they also know the counsellors, the referral routes and, in some cases, the reports. Even when services are nominally confidential, role complexity and visibility can make them feel unsafe. The expectation to be the impartial fixer of “people problems” makes vulnerability look professionally risky.

This is where a mental fitness framing becomes powerful. Support that is positioned as performance‑enhancing training, not remedial care, is easier for HR to access without feeling it undermines their authority. New‑generation, behaviour‑science‑led mental fitness platforms operate explicitly in this space: training the mind in the same way you would train for a 5k, with small, trackable actions rather than one‑off crisis calls. Leafyard’s multi‑month journeys, built on behavioural science and habit‑formation logic, are one example – structured programmes that use guided video coaching and habit‑based tools such as reflective journalling to help users process moral conflicts and build resilience over time. For an HR director who spends a day a week on others’ wellbeing, being able to log in privately, follow a guided series and work through structured prompts is not indulgence; it is risk management.

Designing wellbeing that HR can actually use

If over half of HR professionals experiencing harm are not seeking help, the problem is not simply personal reluctance. It is a design flaw in how wellbeing is set up and governed. Only 17% of HR respondents in the PSHRA survey say their agencies track any data on mental‑health initiatives. At the same time, some agencies have scaled back wellbeing programmes and health‑related benefits. In that context, low uptake among HR becomes invisible, folded into a general story of “limited engagement” rather than flagged as a specific red alert in a high‑risk group.

For senior people leaders, the first shift is conceptual: treat HR as a priority user group in your wellbeing strategy, not just the delivery mechanism. That means asking, explicitly, how safe it is for HR business partners and employee relations specialists to use existing channels. If the only route is the same counselling provider they commission for others, or an internal peer network where they are also the escalation point, the likelihood of underuse is baked in.

External, anonymous digital options can close some of this gap. Platforms like Leafyard, which guarantee complete anonymity between user and employer and route individuals through intelligent triage to either self‑guided content or NCPS‑accredited counsellors, remove the career‑risk calculation that often stops HR from reaching out. Because the system is built on behavioural analytics and evidence‑based design rather than identifiable case notes, HR leaders can still receive board‑ready reports showing engagement trends, mental fitness improvements and pounds‑and‑pence ROI – without ever seeing who in their own function is struggling. That separation is crucial.

The second shift is towards preventative mental fitness rather than reactive support. HR’s exposure to others’ distress is predictable: consultation periods, complex investigations, safeguarding referrals, repeated exposure to trauma narratives. Waiting until an HR manager is in crisis before intervening is both ethically and operationally weak. Preventative tools – from microlearning and five‑day experiments focused on boundaries, sleep or stress, to premium interventions on resilience and hormonal health – allow HR professionals to build capacity ahead of crunch points. This is what “prevention” looks like in practice: small, accessible actions embedded into everyday work, not another workshop squeezed into an already overloaded diary.

The third shift is measurement. With only 17% of agencies tracking mental‑health initiative data, most HR leaders are flying blind. Start small but specific: track HR’s own utilisation of digital wellbeing platforms (in aggregated, anonymous form), monitor the time your team spends on mental health initiatives, and correlate this with core indicators such as sleep, focus or self‑reported burnout where available. Behavioural analytics from a digital EAP can do much of this work automatically, translating engagement and recovery into measurable outcomes that resonate with finance and boards. When you can show, for example, that consistent use of mental fitness journeys is linked to improved sleep and reduced absence in high‑exposure roles, it becomes easier to argue for protected time and realistic caseloads for HR.

What is working already should not be ignored. The CIPD data shows genuine gains in leadership attention and line‑manager buy‑in; 62% of agencies provide health‑related benefits and programmes. The task now is to extend that maturity to the people function itself. That might mean ring‑fencing HR access to 24/7 live chat and same‑day counselling appointments, or ensuring HR teams are explicitly included in Mental Health First Responder training so they are not the only ones holding difficult stories without structured support. Leafyard’s model, with its combination of always‑on digital access, structured journeys and analytics, illustrates how support can be both personally safe for HR and strategically useful for organisations.

The underlying question is straightforward: can your organisation’s wellbeing strategy withstand honest scrutiny if the people running it are unwell?

For HR directors, a practical next step is to review your wellbeing architecture through an HR‑lens audit. Check whether HR’s use of support is visible in your data (anonymously), whether there are genuinely confidential routes that feel safe for HR staff, and whether workload and burnout in the HR team appear on the same leadership agenda that proudly features wellbeing strategies and benefits.

When HR’s mental fitness is treated as a strategic asset – supported by intelligent systems, preventative tools and credible analytics – wellbeing stops being something HR delivers to others and becomes a shared, sustainable capability. Providers such as Leafyard, with their focus on long‑term habit change and transparent data, show that this shift is not theoretical; it is already under way. That is where the next wave of progress will come from.