When HR isn't on your side: How to heal and move on

“I can't believe you worked in HR,” she said it at the end of our session, half-laughing, half-disbelieving.

She'd just been through months and months of what I can only describe as a sustained, unfair process at work. It eventually ended with her leaving. Not because she wanted to, but because staying had become impossible and the working relationship had completely broken down. Her confidence was broken and she'd lost faith in HR professionals as a senior HR professional had been involved in every meeting she'd sat in during this process.

By the time we spoke, she hadn't really talked to anyone who understood what had actually happened. Not the technical side, not the emotional weight of it, not what it actually feels like to sit across a table from people who are supposed to support you and realise they aren't on your side.

We had an in depth conversation of all that happened and did an exercise to help her step outside the process entirely and something shifted, which she described as a massive weight lifting off her shoulders.

HR can be good, but it can also be complicit

With my experience I know how good HR operates, and I know what it looks like when it doesn't.

In some organisations, HR genuinely acts as a fair, independent function. It advises managers properly, applies process correctly, and considers the human being in front of it.

In others, HR cuts corners. It protects the organisation at the expense of the individual. It runs processes that look procedurally correct on paper but aren't fair in practice. This doesn't just happen to people outside of HR, but it happens within HR teams too. If organisations are willing to cut corners with their own HR professionals, people who know employment law, who understand process, who know exactly what should be happening, what does that tell you about how they treat everyone else?

So many people people going through a disciplinary, a PIP, or a redundancy have no idea whether the process is being run correctly and that's the gap Klar exists to fill.

You are allowed to talk about what happened to you

If you've been through a disciplinary, a PIP, a redundancy, a grievance, or anything else that left you feeling ground down by a process that should have been fair, you don't have to carry it alone.

Talking to someone who actually understands HR, from the inside, makes a difference. Not to relitigate the past, but to make sense of it, process it, and move forward feeling less like something happened to you and more like you understand exactly what it was.

If you're ready to talk, this is what my coaching package looks like or you can book a discovery call here.