Honestly,
HR has some excellent advice about work-life balance.
Take your time off. Ask for help. Make the appointment. Use the resources available to you. Your development matters. You can’t keep running at this pace indefinitely.
Sometimes we deliver that advice while answering a work call at ten o’clock at night.
Apparently, we meant everyone else.
Lovely advice.
Very professional.
We should consider trying some of it.
In HR, we spend a lot of time helping employees and managers think through what they need.
Then our own needs arrive, and suddenly the process becomes complicated.
After this situation settles down.
Once we get through this change.
When the team has a little more capacity.
There is always a perfectly reasonable explanation for why now is a bad time.
In HR, “after things settle down” can become a retirement strategy.
There are real responsibilities behind that thinking. People need answers. Difficult situations do not arrange themselves neatly between nine and five. Sometimes a late call really does need to happen.
But when we recommend boundaries while treating our own availability as unlimited, it is worth noticing the contradiction.
Knowing the advice does not make us exempt from needing it.
Neither does being the people who explain the benefits.
We can know exactly where the employee assistance program information lives and still struggle to make room to use it. We can encourage someone else to explore leave while quietly negotiating with ourselves about how long we can keep going. We can advocate for development opportunities and then let our own disappear beneath the next urgent request.
There never seems to be enough time to take care of ourselves.
And yet, if we do not, the consequences reach beyond us.
When HR treats its own needs as optional, we reinforce the very culture we are trying to help everyone else navigate.
The reminder is simple, even if it is not easy: the care and balance we advocate for others also belongs here, within our HR teams.
And if we can say it out loud and take one step toward it, we are not only modeling good practice, we are sustaining the work.
Reflections
1. What advice do we regularly give employees or managers that we struggle to follow within HR?
2. What have we postponed for our own health, rest, or development—and what keeps making it feel postponable?
3. Where does our HR team need better coverage, clearer priorities, or stronger advocacy so taking care of ourselves becomes possible?
From the Toolbox
1. Apply the same standard. Consider an HR team member’s situation as though an employee from another department had brought it forward. Notice whether the advice is more compassionate and realistic than the expectations we set within HR.
2. Make room for one postponed need. Whether it’s an appointment, a conversation about leave, an employee assistance program inquiry, or a development opportunity, identify a concrete next step. People can ask for time and support without sharing personal details with the whole team.
3. Make coverage visible. Agree on who handles what when someone is unavailable, what can wait, and what truly requires an after-hours response. Avoid making one person the permanent backup plan.
4. Put team capacity on the agenda. Discuss workload, competing priorities, and what needs to stop, shift, or receive additional support. Encouragement alone cannot resolve an impossible workload.
5. Practice the boundary together. Support colleagues when they take time, ask for help, or protect development time. Make using those options an ordinary part of how the team works.
