The ‘return to the office’ risks an epidemic of ‘dead butt syndrome’. One way to counteract the dreaded effects of this condition is to get up on your feet to celebrate HR Appreciation Day.
We sincerely hope our readers all felt appreciated yesterday, HR Professional Day, or HR Appreciation Day, whatever. Sadly there were no fireworks, the Red Arrows didn’t fly over (no, don’t include them, Ed), no regatta on the river or dance extravaganzas.
Regrettably, at Personnel Today, we also recognise that despite wanting everyone in HR to feel appreciated, we failed to mention the momentous date – there were just too many news stories crowding the agenda.
In any case, HR doesn’t seek the limelight, the ego-driven need for constant congratulation and faux admiration. In Oscar ceremony terms HR is the cinematography category – highly important but the winner keeps the speech short, no one knows who they are and they don’t make the cut for the highlights. HR is comfortable knowing its true importance but prefers to operate in the shadows.
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As Tanya Channing, chief people and culture officer at Pipedrive puts it, while she celebrated the day: “In my experience, human resources professionals play a much larger role than they’re often given credit for, contributing to both the day-to-day operations and the strategic direction of a company.
“Beyond recruitment and employee wellbeing, HR teams are the driving force behind key initiatives such as skilling, learning and development across departments, which is especially important as emerging technologies like AI continue to impact organisations.” A wild celebration indeed.
Butt wait …
We suggest failure to get up and celebrate such rare occasions could exacerbate a very unpleasant condition known apparently as “dead butt syndrome”. Chair company BodyBilt, which claims to have the solution to this appalling ailment, clearly has a gift for catchy prognosis: dead butt syndrome can also be called ”glute amnesia”.
Hearing this certainly made people twitchy in the Personnel Today office; there was a spontaneous uprising you might say. But then, according to BodyBilt, the solution to this horrid malady is not to stand up. It’s to sit down, in a better chair, on a better kind of material, called Skydex. This mysterious substance is comprised of “engineered geometries that absorb different amounts of energy for each case use, bringing 43% more seated pressure reduction and 51% better weight distribution.”
This will banish glute amnesia. But so will celebrating HR Appreciation Professional Day, whatever it’s called, by standing up and waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care. But you do care – because it’s HR.
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