Are any other HR people feeling a bit lonely in all this :(

Thank you Samantha for starting this thread.

Around March/April time I was feeling exactly the same.
Juggling employee and manager concerns, whilst in the background seeing the effect on the business and having to work with our regional director to protect positions. I started to feel frustration over the petty employee concerns and squabbles and losing faith in people. I couldn't understand how, especially during this time, they couldn't just come together and see the bigger picture that we're all in. Being a standalone position and having no one to talk to didn't help either. I was losing my drive to work in this profession if I'm honest.

Then things calmed down a bit when we had a clearer picture of what the new normal would be. I started to get back in to the swing of things and my outlook became more positive.

Sadly, we now find ourselves in another form of limbo, wondering what the after-effects of this situation will be and how long can we hold off on more redundancies. This prospect looming over us for the foreseeable fills me with anxiety. It's going to be a difficult end to the year I feel.

Times like this I wish I was in a HR team to share the burdens.

Hi Emily,

I was having the exact same thoughts as you and also in a standalone role. And absolutely the petty school ground like squabbles that some of our employees were having and people asking why we didn't just shut the business down for an unknown potentially indefinite period of time and expecting that if we did that they would still get full pay and have a job at the end of it all. It became very tiring explaining to people that this wasn't possible and that if they didn't want to come to work then they were more than welcome to take holiday or unpaid leave (funnily enough they weren't too keen on that idea) - of course this was before furlough and then we had the endless questions of why has X been furloughed and not me and the snarky comments about "oh it's alright for the office - you get to sit at home all day"

Don't get me wrong most of our workforce came together to work well to point that we had a supervisor agree to be furloughed so one of his team who is a single parent wasn't (their roles overlap) and our IT support driving back and forth to someones home to collect their laptop and test it out in the car because it wasn't working and the employee was shielding so couldn't come to the office. Those things restored faith a bit.

I think (and hope) that it's starting to get a bit better now, we're gradually bringing people back - albeit on temporary shift patterns/adjusted hours - and those of us working from home have been working together to get a rota in place to allow us all a couple of days in the office without having too many at a time.

It is just now the lingering concern of the longer term impact on the business and whether or not we come out the other end without any redundancies.

One thing I found helpful, and I don't know if this is an option for you Emily, is that all the HR managers from the other sites in the UK joined up as a team and we formed a HR network as we were all doing the same tasks and having pretty much the same struggles so we started having daily (now weekly) calls to talk through things and update on each of our sites and that really helped as we were able to share resources. You say you have a regional director so are there perhaps other HR teams on other sites - could you perhaps reach out to them and build a virtual team?

Hopefully we're all feeling a little more positive or less dragged down by it all now to some degree.

Hi Emily,

I was having the exact same thoughts as you and also in a standalone role. And absolutely the petty school ground like squabbles that some of our employees were having and people asking why we didn't just shut the business down for an unknown potentially indefinite period of time and expecting that if we did that they would still get full pay and have a job at the end of it all. It became very tiring explaining to people that this wasn't possible and that if they didn't want to come to work then they were more than welcome to take holiday or unpaid leave (funnily enough they weren't too keen on that idea) - of course this was before furlough and then we had the endless questions of why has X been furloughed and not me and the snarky comments about "oh it's alright for the office - you get to sit at home all day"

Don't get me wrong most of our workforce came together to work well to point that we had a supervisor agree to be furloughed so one of his team who is a single parent wasn't (their roles overlap) and our IT support driving back and forth to someones home to collect their laptop and test it out in the car because it wasn't working and the employee was shielding so couldn't come to the office. Those things restored faith a bit.

I think (and hope) that it's starting to get a bit better now, we're gradually bringing people back - albeit on temporary shift patterns/adjusted hours - and those of us working from home have been working together to get a rota in place to allow us all a couple of days in the office without having too many at a time.

It is just now the lingering concern of the longer term impact on the business and whether or not we come out the other end without any redundancies.

One thing I found helpful, and I don't know if this is an option for you Emily, is that all the HR managers from the other sites in the UK joined up as a team and we formed a HR network as we were all doing the same tasks and having pretty much the same struggles so we started having daily (now weekly) calls to talk through things and update on each of our sites and that really helped as we were able to share resources. You say you have a regional director so are there perhaps other HR teams on other sites - could you perhaps reach out to them and build a virtual team?

Hopefully we're all feeling a little more positive or less dragged down by it all now to some degree.