Trauma informed HR must start with HR

Before HR can champion wellbeing across an organisation, it must confront a difficult truth: the people responsible for supporting everyone else are themselves reaching breaking point. New research lays bare just how serious the situation has become.

The 2025 HR Mental Wellbeing Report, conducted by Ultimate Resilience in partnership with Towergate Employee Benefits, delivers a stark warning: 63% of HR professionals say burnout is “very likely”, with a further 15% at risk. Eighty‑seven percent report insufficient support at work, and 44% meet the criteria for clinically significant symptoms of depression, nearly three times the rate of the general population.

These statistics describe a profession operating far beyond its capacity. And while stress‑related absence remains one of the most common causes of long‑term sickness across the wider workforce, HR teams are not adjacent to this mental health crisis; they are embedded at the centre of it.

The emotional load HR carries

From managing allegations of bullying, harassment, and discrimination to supporting employees through grievance, personal crisis, and organisational change, HR professionals are routinely exposed to high‑conflict, high‑emotion situations. They are the ones holding distress, repeatedly, and often without structured support.

This is the backdrop against which trauma‑informed practice must be understood. It is not a trend. It is a necessity.

At its core, trauma‑informed HR means recognising how trauma shapes behaviour, responses, and relationships at work. It requires consistency, psychological safety, clarity of process, and an awareness of how organisational actions can either mitigate or compound harm. Done well, it reduces escalation, improves fairness, and builds trust.

But amid an ongoing mental health crisis, one critical question is being overlooked: What does trauma‑informed practice mean for HR itself?

Vicarious trauma: the hidden risk

HR professionals sit at the centre of organisational distress. Repeated exposure to others’ distress leads to vicarious trauma — the cumulative emotional impact of engaging with difficult, often painful experiences.

It can show up as:

• empathy fatigue
• reduced capacity
• shortened patience
• diminished curiosity
• increasingly transactional decision‑making

These shifts erode the cornerstone of effective HR practice: independence and procedural fairness.

This is where trauma‑informed practice must begin.

If HR is expected to create safety, HR must also have safety

If HR practitioners are expected to create psychologically safe, fair and consistent processes for others, they must themselves have the conditions that enable them to do so. Trauma‑informed practice is not only about how we treat employees; it is about whether the people responsible for those processes are sufficiently supported to carry them out well.

One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through supervision.

Why supervision matters

In therapeutic and clinical professions, supervision is a formal, structured space to reflect on practice, process emotional impact and maintain professional standards. It is not performance management, nor is it informal peer support. It is an independent, confidential and essential component of safe practice.

Yet HR — a profession routinely exposed to distress — is rarely supported to process that impact. It remains largely unsupervised, often isolated, and expected to remain impartial regardless of emotional load.

Introducing supervision offers a practical, immediate intervention. It creates space to process complex cases, challenge bias, rebuild emotional capacity and maintain clarity in decision‑making. Crucially, it acknowledges that HR is not immune to the impact of the work it undertakes.

Building a trauma‑informed HR function

Alongside supervision, organisations should:

• embed reflective practice
• ensure access to external support services
• recognise the emotional labour inherent in employee relations work

If we want to change the statistics affecting both our workforces and our HR practitioners, we must stop treating these support systems as “nice to haves” and recognise them as foundational to a fair and effective HR function.

Trauma‑informed practice offers a way forward — but only if we apply it honestly. That means it cannot sit solely in policies or training. It must be lived within the function responsible for delivering it.