Something has shifted in the world of Employee Relations. And if you work in HR right now, you already know exactly what I’m talking about.
The grievances have changed. The disciplinaries have changed. The sheer volume and complexity of ER casework has intensified in a way that is having a very real impact on the HR professionals managing it. And over the last few weeks, I’ve had more candidates than ever reaching out to tell me the same thing: it’s all just gone a bit bonkers.
The AI Grievance Has Arrived
Let me paint you a picture. An employee raises a grievance. It arrives as a 24-page document. Solicitor-style formatting. Detailed legal references. Structured arguments. It looks like it’s been prepared by someone with years of employment law experience.
Then the meeting happens. And the employee sitting across the table has no idea what’s actually in it.
This is the AI grievance. And it is becoming increasingly common. According to a recent survey, 70% of HR and business leaders have now seen a rise in suspected AI-assisted grievances. Employees are using AI tools to generate highly sophisticated, legally framed complaints that far exceed anything they could have produced themselves – and in many cases, far exceed their actual understanding of the issues they’re raising.
The result? HR teams are spending enormous amounts of time and resource investigating, responding to, and managing grievances of a complexity and length that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. The workload has intensified dramatically. And the fatigue is very real.
The Wider ER Picture
But it’s not just AI grievances. The entire ER landscape has shifted.
Post-pandemic, employees are more aware of their rights than ever before. Social media, legal advice websites, and now AI tools have made employment law more accessible – which in many ways is a good thing. But it has also created a culture where formal processes are reached for much earlier and much more readily than they used to be.
Managers who haven’t been properly trained are making costly mistakes that create ER cases downstream. Remote and hybrid working has introduced new complexity around performance management, monitoring, and reasonable adjustments. The Employment Rights Bill is creating uncertainty and nervousness on both sides. And employees, emboldened by easier access to information and AI-generated documentation, are escalating issues that might previously have been resolved informally over a conversation and a cup of tea.
The volume and complexity of ER work hitting HR teams right now is unlike anything most professionals have experienced. And it shows no signs of slowing down.
The Human Cost
Here’s what concerns me most. The people managing all of this are exhausted.
I’ve had more conversations in the last few weeks about ER fatigue than in the previous year combined. HR professionals telling me they’re burnt out. That the relentlessness of it is getting to them. That they went into HR because they wanted to make a difference to people’s working lives – to develop culture, to support wellbeing, to build something – and instead they’re spending their days wading through disciplinaries and grievances that seem to multiply faster than they can resolve them.
Everyone wants a wellbeing role. Everyone wants to work on people strategy, culture, or L&D. And the cruel irony is that the people who most need someone to look after their wellbeing right now are the HR professionals who are supposed to be looking after everyone else’s.
There’s also a broader professional concern here. The true HR generalist role – the well-rounded professional who moves comfortably between ER, recruitment, L&D, policy and strategy – is quietly becoming harder to find. When ER demand is this intense, people specialise or they burn out. And when they specialise away from ER because they need a break from it, the pool of experienced ER practitioners gets smaller.
Which creates a problem for employers, because right now ER experience is exactly what they need most.
The ER Specialists Who Thrive On It
But here’s the other side of the story. Because for every HR professional who is desperate to escape the ER caseload, there is another who absolutely loves it.
The ER specialists who genuinely thrive in this environment are a rare and brilliant breed. They get a real buzz from the complexity. They relish the pace. They find deep satisfaction in working through a heavy caseload methodically, bringing case numbers down, and finding resolutions that protect both the business and the individual. A particularly knotty grievance that would keep most people awake at night is, for them, an interesting problem to solve.
These are the people who are quietly becoming some of the most valuable HR professionals on the market. If you are someone who genuinely enjoys ER, who can hold their nerve under pressure, manage multiple complex cases simultaneously, and still bring empathy and fairness to every situation, employers are actively looking for you right now. And they will pay well for it.
The challenge is that there aren’t enough of you. Which is exactly why the ones who exist should know just how in demand they are.
What Employers Are Doing About It
Clients are telling me they need stronger ER experience in their HR hires than ever before. And they’re getting much more sophisticated about how they assess it.
Gone are the days of a couple of competency questions about managing a difficult situation. Employers are now bringing in case studies, detailed scenario-based interviews, and specific situational questions designed to test genuine depth of knowledge and experience. They want to know how a candidate would actually handle a complex AI-generated grievance, a tricky performance management case, or a sensitive disciplinary where the manager has already made mistakes.
If you have strong ER experience and you can genuinely handle the pace and complexity of today’s caseload, you are extremely valuable on the job market right now. ER might not be the most glamorous specialism – in most HR teams where work is split by specialism, ER tends to be the least popular, with L&D, recruitment and wellbeing taking clear precedence. But the demand is real, the salaries reflect it, and the candidates who can do it well are in short supply.
A Message to HR Professionals
If you’re feeling the weight of ER right now, you are not alone. What you’re managing is genuinely harder than it has ever been. The complexity has increased, the volume has increased, and the emotional toll of managing contentious, drawn-out cases day after day is significant.
It’s OK to say it’s exhausting. It’s OK to want something different. And it’s OK to explore whether there’s a role out there that plays more to the parts of HR that energise you rather than drain you.
A Message to Employers
If your HR team is struggling under the weight of ER right now, take it seriously. The fatigue is real and the risk of losing good people who simply can’t sustain the pace is very real too.
Invest in management training to reduce the number of ER cases being created through poor people management. Make sure your HR team has the resource, the support, and the time to do the work properly. And when you’re hiring, be honest about the ER demand in your organisation – because a candidate who knows what they’re walking into is far more likely to thrive than one who finds out six weeks in.
Until next Sunday,
Lyndsey
P.S. We’ve got a strong line-up of roles live right across Cumbria and the North East. Head over to our jobs page and take a look, you never know what you might find!
