The First Responders We've Forgotten
- Julie Turney
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
It's 2:00 in the morning.
You're asleep. If you have loved ones in the house, they're asleep too, tucked away in their rooms. You start to notice the smell of smoke. You get up. You look. Your kitchen is on fire, and it is moving fast toward the living room.
So you do what anybody would do. You get your people, move them to safety, then you call emergency services. Now hold that picture, because this is where it gets uncomfortable.
The fire service arrives, and the hose doesn't reach. It's too short, it won't connect, or it simply doesn't reach the fire.
How do you feel? Frustrated, terrified, furious, possibly all of it at once. Now ask the other question. The one I asked a room in Graz, Austria, and have been asking ever since. How do you think that firefighter feels? They trained for this. This is the whole reason they exist. They ran toward the thing everybody else ran away from, and when they got there, someone had handed them equipment that could not do the job.
That is not a story about weakness. That is a story about being sent in unequipped.
Why I opened a TEDx talk with a fire
I needed a way to say something about HR that people would actually hear, because if I had walked onto that stage and opened with "HR professionals are burning out," half the room would have nodded politely and thought about lunch. Everyone is burning out. It has become background noise.
But nobody dismisses a firefighter with a hose that doesn't reach. So that's how I made the argument: your HR team is a first responder. When something goes wrong in your organisation a death, a resignation, an accusation, a restructure, a mental health crisis at 11 pm on a Sunday- they are who you call. They run toward it. That is the job, and for a very long time, we have been sending them in unequipped.
What HR actually ran into
In 2020, the whole world found out what a crisis feels like at the same time, and HR ran into every single building. We sat glued to televisions waiting for governments to change legislation, then translated that legislation into company policy overnight. We decided who was sent home. We worked out how people could keep working safely. We managed the moment when home culture and company culture collided in the same room, because suddenly they were in the same room with children, parents, and partners who had spent years passing each other like ships at breakfast now sharing one kitchen table.
We held space for all of it. Professionally and emotionally, and we did it while our own houses were on fire too. Burnout became very real for a lot of us. However, saying it out loud was the hard part, and here is why: Most of us never found the words. We just kept going.
How do you tell your CEO the person looking to you to hold the whole organisation together that you need holding too?
The part of my story I nearly didn't tell
I've been in HR for over twenty years. For most of them, I was the stalwart. The one with the solution. The one running into burning buildings like it was nothing.
My first burnout came after losing my job during a divestment, and my husband suffered a massive heart attack all in the same year. It was the first time that had happened in my life, and it shattered something in me. I didn't feel like the professional I was supposed to be. I felt like I had failed my family.
My second came through the pandemic. Months of arguing with leadership about why people deserved to keep their jobs. Why they deserved to keep working from home. And then the ending I did not see coming: I lost my own job through a layoff.
When decisions get made that everyone has value except the people who support the people, it does something to you. There were weeks I could not move. My mother and my children sat by my bed and begged me to say something. Anything.
I got up. I went to therapy. And then I got a coach, because I had finally accepted that I could not do this thing called HR on my own anymore.
That's when HR@Heart was born. Not from a business plan, from a recovery.
Four years on, the hose still doesn't reach
I gave that talk in 2022 believing that once the pandemic receded, some of this would resolve itself.
It didn't. The crisis conditions are simply less visible now. The department of one is still a department of one. The person expected to be "strategic" is still running payroll queries out of a spreadsheet. The 2 am email still arrives. The HR leader who held an entire organisation together through the worst three years of its life is still the person with no one to call.
What has changed is that I no longer think this is a wellbeing problem. I think it is an equipment problem, and equipment problems have owners.
Watch the talk
This is the argument in full: the fire, the polls, the data, and what I asked of leaders on that stage.
If you're in HR, watch it and send it to one person who needs to know they're not imagining it.
If you lead an organisation, watch it and then look honestly at what you've handed your HR team to work with.
Over the next twelve weeks, I'm going to unpack this talk one idea at a time: the day nobody clapped, the polls that told me I wasn't alone, and what I now believe leaders owe the people who hold everyone else together.
Start here.
About Me
I’m Julie Turney, founder of HR@Heart Consulting and host of the HR Sound Off Podcast. After 20+ years in HR, I now make sure HR professionals have the support system we were never given. I’m the author of Confessions of an HR Pro: Stories of Defeat and Triumph, a TEDx speaker, and the person who Googled “HRforHR” in 2020, found nothing, and decided to build it.
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