Key Takeaways:
HR leaders are often trapped with never-ending busy work that takes them away from meaningful tasks that drive the business forward, and it’s not going away anytime soon. This not only eats up precious time from People Teams, but also impacts the company at a greater scale. When HR suffers, the rest of the business does as well.
In particular, leave management is a crucial area that can make or break the work experience. When done well, employees are far more likely to stay for multiple years. If done poorly, employees take note, meaning HR must prioritize the leave experience to ensure their employees are supported and taken care of.
In a recent webinar hosted by The Modern People Leader, Tilt COO Taylor McLemore and Ethena CPO Melanie Naranjo shared valuable insights into this challenge. Discover the practical, real-world strategies for breaking free in this recap blog.
For HR professionals, their job title can often feel like a misnomer. Instead of focusing on employee experience and leadership enablement, they end up falling into the dreaded, ‘HR busy work trap.’ Whether it’s putting out unnecessary fires or dealing with manual data maintenance, this trap is relentless and never ending. It prevents People teams from executing the high-value work that drives the business forward.
The Hard Truth: HR Teams Are Buried in Admin
It’s no surprise to anyone, let alone HR professionals, that People teams are under an immense load of busy work. Not the type that is always meaningful, either. This workload often includes tasks like compensation planning spreadsheets, audits, manual data entries, and a never-ending trail of paperwork that seems to follow them wherever they go.
Ultimately, tasks that can be automated, should be—especially when managing a leave of absence.
Leave management is a particularly high-stakes area where HR often gets bogged down. As Taylor noted, this process is “high stakes, a lot of it can be manual, depending on how you’re doing it.” When administrative burden consumes HR’s bandwidth, the company misses out on crucial strategic opportunities, such as employee retention. Taylor pointed out that when employees “have a great leave experience, they’re 75% more likely to stay for 5 years.“
In other words, staying in this trap imposes risks that go beyond day-to-day operations. But the problem runs deeper than just dealing with external teams.
The Commitment Trap: When Working Hard Prevents Working Smart
HR operates from a place of deep commitment, often feeling they must demonstrate their value and care through relentless effort and manual attention to detail. This dedication, while admirable, can inadvertently lead to the very busy work trap they seek to escape—falling into the pattern of working harder, not smarter.
As Melanie explained:
“We work so much harder and not smarter, because we are trying to show, look how much we care about the company, and so it can be hard to say, wait, what do you mean ‘give these things over to a tool?’…There is a much easier, much higher impact way to prove yourself at your company rather than getting mired down in busy work.”
The Ripple Effect of Overstrained Systems
Unfortunately, HR’s busy work isn’t slowing down. In SHRM’s 2025 State of the Workplace Report, 62% of HR professionals are working beyond their capacity, undermining the need for solutions that can address common pain points, including:
- Admin overload filled with endless forms, requests, and checklists
- Disconnected tools and number of manual workflows
- Constant pings from employees and leadership
When HR is stretched beyond their limit with busy work, it opens the door to unwanted horror stories that make People Teams both the police and the policy firefighter. Every hour spent on fighting unwanted fires is time taken away from strategic initiatives that actually move the business forward.
4 Strategies to Reclaim HR Bandwidth
The cost of busy work is clear, but the path forward is achievable whether your team is one or a full cohort. These four practices can not only help your team break free from the busy work trap, but ensure you’re taking advantage of the resources around you – helping you and the company to succeed.
1. Design for Simplicity
The first step is simplifying complex, manual processes. Taylor advocates for designing policy with the human experience at the center.
“Leave processes can be overcomplicated, so the thing that I love to focus on is how do you design for simplicity and get to the root cause? Start at the beginning and take agency to say ‘how does something like our leave policy help us succeed as a company?’”
By moving to a simpler leave process, companies can reclaim several hours each week by eliminating and automating manual approvals — providing employees with the most valuable gift: time.
2. Pursue Efficiency, Especially Within Schedules
What is the constant variable in the never-ending HR busy work? Time. The trap constricts this freedom for People teams, often leaving them double or triple booked throughout the day with little time to complete the meaningful tasks that drive the business forward. For People teams looking to be free from this cyclical feeling, pursuing an efficient must be a key strategic objective.
A helpful practice for new initiatives is to replace time, not add it. To drive adoption and show respect for already-full employee schedules, HR should:
- Leverage existing structures: Avoid creating new work for managers.
- Secure time by replacement: For required training, work with department leads to replace a standing team meeting or existing session rather than demanding a new, additional slot on the calendar.
This thoughtful approach respects employees’ workloads, ensuring higher engagement and faster content adoption.
3. Leverage AI as a Strategic Co-Pilot
AI is the ultimate tool for HR teams, not a replacement or threat to their job. For Melanie, HR doesn’t need to be an AI mechanic; they simply need to know which tool to leverage and how to use it effectively.
“You do need to know enough about Al to do your job effectively… You need to know enough about Al to understand that your current vendors and solution is behind the times on technology, and you need to get a better solution that is more Al-powered.” – Melanie Naranjo
HR professionals are uniquely positioned to lead AI strategy, as they live “at the intersection of a policy and making something happen all the time.” This skill is crucial for building a future where humans and bots work together. Using AI to outsource administrative work, like policy bots or automated course builders, frees up HR to focus on high-impact strategic work.
4. Distribute the Workload (Especially for HR Teams of One)
For HR teams, the workload distribution should be non-negotiable. Find the right language for the key decision maker whether that’s a CEO, CFO, or another member of senior leadership. If you’re a team of one, distributing the workload could mean handing ownership of a task to another department head, or by creating a committee where those interested can lead the charge of a particular initiative.
In short, the solution doesn’t always need to be HR. Oftentimes, the right person is someone on a different team. As Melanie noted,
“Distribute the workload, distribute responsibility, distribute ownership. The solution is not always us. Sometimes a solution is finding the right person to do the thing, and it’s not always you, and that’s okay. That’s called being smart, strategic, and prioritizing.”
Reclaiming HR Bandwidth: Practicing These Strategies
Every HR team is built differently, but these strategies are all united under the same goal of improving productivity and winning back your bandwidth. Remember those common pain points from earlier? These best practices can help overcome these hurdles:
Overloaded with endless forms, requests, and checklists? Admin work can be designed for efficiency and delegated if you have a team around you. A great place to start could be:
- Consolidating the number of forms
- Limiting requests to either department heads or senior leadership
- Delegating admin work to subordinates or other members within your team
Struggling with disconnected tools and too many workflows? You’re not alone. Begin by mapping out where tools and workflows fall short, and take action by:
- Identifying how these processes help the company to succeed
- Labeling where the root cause of break down is (where is this falling short?)
- Scheduling time with subject matter experts from within to understand each tool’s best use case
Inbox flooded with endless messages from employees and leadership? This is a perfect opportunity to both implement AI and delegate the workload to streamline communication, which can include:
- Leveraging AI to help build a Q&A resource for the team’s FAQs
- Creating a committee to handle communication if questions root from common event or program
Escape the Busy Work Trap, For Good.
Between managing a tight schedule and a long list of demands, it can be easy to read everything and wonder where is the best place to start for taking back more of your time. Implementing these practices is a great first step. Even if HR teams start by reducing the number of meetings, that can free up hours every week to focus on the meaningful work that moves the needle forward.
The good news? You don’t have to start this journey alone. At Tilt, we’ve helped hundreds of HR teams like yours manage their leave of absence management, saving them countless hours to focus on the things they enjoy most. If you’re interested to see how Tilt can save you time and free you from the HR busy work trap, schedule time with us here, we’d love to help!
