What does HR stand for: Human Resources or Human Remains?

Early on in my career, I remember seeing a computer screensaver, it was just two words floating around the screen changing angles and reversing. The two words said 'Human Remains'. My first instinct was to look at the screen again, because I thought it said Human Resources and my brain had just mixed up the second word, but the more I looked, I realised it was not a mistake and it made me laugh a little.

Why is it all about?

Human Remains is an office joke and it used to get made in HR circles. The joke started as a way of people venting their frustration at various things that occurred in the workplace. Employees would use it to complain about slow responses they would receive to simple questions being asked, a lack of empathy being shown during restructures, or feeling like they are treated as just numbers or cogs in a larger machine rather than real people.

The irony is when HR professionals used the term they would also be using it out of frustration. The constant chasing of management in order to answer a question, making sure stakeholders would look at a restructure objectively, or providing directors information on how a new scheme or incentive would impact all employees.

What both sides are really saying

Look closely at both versions of the joke and they're pointing at the same thing. Employees making it are usually reacting to HR feeling distant or mechanical, like their concerns have been filed rather than heard. HR professionals making it are usually reacting to the opposite problem, being so buried in process and pressure from every direction that there's no time left to be the human, empathetic function they actually trained to be. Neither side is wrong. They're both describing the same broken middle or disconnect.

Why the joke hasn't gone away

Screensavers have disappeared. The joke hasn't. If anything, it's found a second life in HR WhatsApp groups and LinkedIn comment sections, because the conditions that created it are still very much alive in most SMEs.

The most senior HR person in a business is still, in most cases, the only senior HR person in that business. Every strategic call still lands with them alone. Still chasing management for answers, still trying to get stakeholders to look at a restructure objectively, still translating what a new scheme means for every employee it touches, and still doing all of it without a peer in the room to think it through with.

Let's be clear this is not a personality trait or resilience gap that needs to be overcome. It is a structural problem that occurs when people at the top of the business do not understand the role HR has. There is not an easy solution either, it is not simply about the senior HR person working harder, it is about others understanding.

Where the joke stops being funny

The dark humour works because there's truth in it, but the truth underneath it isn't really about HR being cold or mechanical. It's about what happens to a genuinely good HR professional when they are never given the space to be anything other than reactive. The empathy is still there. The strategic thinking is still there. What's missing is the room to use either, and often the business itself doesn't realise it's the one filling that room up.

There's a particular irony worth naming here. The HR professional living this is usually the person everyone else in the business turns to when they need somewhere safe to say something difficult. She creates that space for others constantly, and often without being asked. But there's rarely an equivalent space for her. Nobody checking whether she's okay, nobody offering her the same safety she offers everyone else. She's expected to be the one who holds it together, not the one who occasionally needs to be held.

It shows up in smaller ways too. Developing her own team, something she knows matters and genuinely wants to do, keeps getting pushed behind whatever's most urgent that day. Not because she doesn't value it, but because there's no capacity left once everything else has taken its share.

So what can HR professionals actually do about it

The businesses that take HR seriously are usually the ones where HR has actively shaped that perception, rather than hoping it happens on its own.

A few things make a genuine difference;

• Bring data, not just opinion - A restructure recommendation or a policy change lands differently when it's backed by turnover figures, engagement data or absence trends rather than instinct alone. Directors take numbers seriously in a way they don't always take a gut feeling.

• Get in the room earlier - If HR is only ever consulted after a decision has been made, that's usually because HR has been positioned as an execution function rather than a strategic one. Asking to be part of the conversation before the decision, and showing up with something useful when you get there, changes that positioning over time.

• Say no to work that isn't HR's to carry - Every time operational admin gets absorbed without question, it reinforces the idea that HR is a catch-all rather than a strategic function. Pushing back, even gently, on work that should sit elsewhere is part of resetting what the role actually is.

• Make the business case visible - Directors respond to impact. Framing HR's work in terms of retention saved, risk avoided or productivity protected, rather than tasks completed, makes it much harder to see HR as an overhead.

  
  

None of this happens overnight, and none of it is easy to do entirely alone, particularly when you're already stretched. But it's also exactly the kind of work that becomes possible when there's someone alongside you to think it through with, rather than carrying the whole shift in perception by yourself. The joke will probably keep circulating for years yet, but the HR leaders who start reshaping how their business sees the function are the ones who stop needing it to be funny.