The scope of HR’s responsibilities has drastically increased in recent years. Today, it is no longer just recruitment, onboarding, and personnel administration, but also maintaining work-life balance, diversity policies, hybrid work management, and implementing rules for the use of artificial intelligence. What’s more, personnel departments are drowning in bureaucracy – according to analyses by the consulting firm Deloitte, up to 60 percent of HR tasks are not related to employee wellbeing. The result? Great initiatives and the real needs of employees end up in one place: in a queue that never ends.
“We are observing a dangerous paradox: management expects specialists in this area to heal the organization and build team engagement, without noticing, however, that they are drowning in operational work. As a result, such an overloaded unit becomes an organizational ‘bottleneck’. Great initiatives end up there – managers’ ideas and employees’ inquiries – but few of them are realized. The effects of this paralysis strike at everyday work: processes are significantly prolonged, and employees slowly lose faith in their agency within the organization. This means that HR stops being a supporting function and starts to genuinely block the company’s pace of action,“ explains Magda Pietkiewicz, a labor market expert and creator of the Enpulse platform – a modern HR tool supporting employers in building employee engagement.
Anatomy of organizational chaos – the disproportion between tasks and resources
The scale of this overload is clearly illustrated by hard data. A report by the Society for Human Resource Management, State of the Workplace 2025, shows that as many as 62% of HR specialists admit their teams are functioning on the verge of exhaustion. Additionally, 57% of departments struggle with physical staff shortages. Even employees already see this workload and its impact on efficiency – the effectiveness of personnel departments is rated positively by only 4 out of 10 employees.
“It is not a matter of a lack of competence or willingness, but pure mathematics. The problem is not an ineffective HR – the problem is an organizational model that overloads it to the point where it begins to block its own processes. With such obvious staff shortages and a flood of current affairs, HR loses its physical capacity to be an effective informational bridge between the board and the workforce. It is impossible to focus on the employee when juggling administration, recruitment, and board initiatives. Let’s remember that HR professionals are also employees and their motivation can drop too. How can such a person build the wellbeing of others then?” emphasizes the expert.
Communication bottleneck and the slippery slope of engagement
When HR is blocked, the entire company suffers because the crucial flow of information dies. Periodic evaluations are delayed, there is a lack of time for honest feedback, and messages from the board reach teams with a delay or in a distorted form. Data from the Enpulse Engagement 2025 report shows that as many as 40% of employees rate the flow of information in the company as insufficient, and a similar percentage declares a lack of trust in management decisions. As a result, fewer and fewer people feel that their voices and wellbeing are genuinely taken into account. This, in turn, leads to a decline in engagement.
“This is a moment of high business risk for any company. When HR stops smoothly passing on feedback, the board starts operating ‘blindly’. Decisions are made based on gut feelings, rather than real data from inside the organization. As a result, the strategy begins to diverge from reality, and the costs of this discrepancy are counted in hundreds of thousands of zlotys,” says Magda Pietkiewicz.
The “oxygen mask” rule in business too
How to get out of this crisis and unblock company processes? First of all, the personnel department must first take care of its own tools and optimize its processes to be able to effectively support employees again. According to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2025 report, over half of the working time of HR departments is still devoted to administrative tasks, which in many cases could be automated. The main recommendation for companies in this context is to crucially relieve HR by investing in technologies.
“Artificial intelligence is entering HR departments very quickly – available studies indicate that a majority of organizations have already introduced artificial intelligence into human resources. The problem, however, is that not every one of them fully utilizes the possibilities offered by AI or automation. This is dangerous; if we don’t take care of the foundations now, namely automation and tools that take repetitive work off teams’ plates, we will soon be catching up under time pressure. And that is not how you build anyone’s engagement,” warns the expert.
The tax on a lack of attentiveness
“When we take the burden of spreadsheets and procedures off the shoulders of HR experts, they will gain the space to become real support for the board in building an effective and profitable culture of engagement. Because let’s remember that every disengaged employee is a ‘hole’ in the budget of about 35 thousand zlotys a year. At a scale of a dozen or so people, we are already talking about really large amounts leaking from the company just because no one had the time to listen to the team. In practice, this is a tax on a lack of attentiveness – a cost that companies pay not in invoices, but in lost engagement and results. The longer recruitment processes stand still, and crucial feedback from employees fails to reach decision-makers, the greater the losses. The problem of the bottleneck in HR is therefore not an operational challenge – it is a management malpractice paid for with real margin,” adds Magda Pietkiewicz.
