For everyone who thinks rest is as easy as logging off and curling up with Netflix—ask an HR professional. They’ll tell you it’s not the laptop that’s hard to shut down. It’s the mind.
Because HR doesn’t just manage people. It carries them—their worries, escalations, and 9 p.m. pings that start with “Just a small thing…”
So what happens when HR tries to practise what it preaches and take a real break? Turns out, the hardest part of switching off is convincing yourself that the world won’t collapse while you’re gone.
Here’s what three HR leaders learned when they actually tried it.
Lesson 1: You can’t just declare rest
Sriharsha Achar, former CHRO, Star Health Insurance, admits that even the most well-meaning breaks can fail. “I hadn’t forgotten how to rest,” he says. “I’d forgotten how to disconnect.”
He recalls deciding to take a full weekend off—no calls, no mails, no updates. The intention was pure. The execution? Not so much. Within hours, he found himself scrolling through reports he’d already reviewed twice.
“We talk about balance, wellness, and time-off, but quietly, we wear busyness as a badge of honour. We confuse being available with being reliable. We mistake constant engagement for commitment.”
Sriharsha Achar, former CHRO, Star Health Insurance
“We talk about balance, wellness, and time-off,” he explains, “but quietly, we wear busyness as a badge of honour. We confuse being available with being reliable. We mistake constant engagement for commitment.”
His learning? Boundaries aren’t about bold declarations. They’re about daily discipline. The real breakthrough came when he stopped equating silence with laziness. “Some of our best insights emerge when the noise fades,” he reflects.
“Switching off isn’t about shutting down devices—it’s about training your mind to stop seeking the next ping. And that requires conscious, daily effort.”
Lesson 2: The habit that won’t break overnight
Mukul Chopra, senior HR leader, is refreshingly candid about his own struggle. “Frankly, I failed miserably,” he laughs. “You can’t just say, ‘I’ll log off today.’ The habit of being constantly available builds over years—it can’t vanish overnight.”
He draws a sharp comparison to International Yoga Day. “We celebrate balance for a day, post photos, and go back to late-night calls on Monday. That’s hypocrisy.”
“When we started our careers, work ended at the desktop. Now, we carry our office in our pocket. Someone will WhatsApp even at 1 a.m., and if you don’t get messages, you panic—Am I still relevant?”
Mukul Chopra, senior HR professional
Technology, he believes, has made detachment almost impossible. “When we started our careers, work ended at the desktop. Now, we carry our office in our pocket. Someone will WhatsApp even at 1 a.m., and if you don’t get messages, you panic—Am I still relevant?”
For Chopra, the obsession with being “always on” comes from fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of losing visibility. Fear of not being indispensable.
“But no one is indispensable,” he reminds. “You drop out today, and within a week things are normal again.”
His prescription isn’t another wellness campaign—it’s structural change. “If organisations mean it, they must create the ecosystem for disconnection. There should be just one official channel of communication—email. And no personal apps. Mails should deactivate after 6 p.m.”
In France, the ‘Right to Disconnect’ is enshrined in law. In India, rest is still seen as a matter of personal discipline—or company culture, if you’re lucky. The irony? We celebrate employees who respond the fastest, not those who manage their boundaries the best.
Balance isn’t a weekend experiment. It’s a slow rewiring of behaviour. “Like in James Clear’s Atomic Habits, small steps sustained over time matter,” he points out.
His ideal scenario? “A workplace where you tell employees—work from 10 to 6, then go watch the sunset guilt-free. Rest is not the opposite of performance. It’s the fuel for it.”
Lesson 3: Context matters—Not everyone can log off
Emmanuel David, a senior HR leader, brings perspective from sectors that never sleep.
“Experts often talk about a ‘soft landing’—easing back into work with rest and renewal,” he says. “That may work in some sectors, but not where the nature of work is continuous—oil, gas, pharma, healthcare.”
For such industries, a “switch-off” could mean operational risk. “Your stakeholders are never in soft-landing mode,” he explains. “If your client or patient needs an urgent response, you can’t tell them you’re digitally detoxing.”
“Your stakeholders are never in soft-landing mode. If your client or patient needs an urgent response, you can’t tell them you’re digitally detoxing.”
Emmanuel David, senior HR leader
David argues that balance has to be redefined, not romanticised. “HR should design boundaries suited to context. Some teams can log off completely. Others need structured downtime within shifts. The principle is the same—protect energy without compromising duty.”
His point hits home: wellbeing policies can’t be copy-pasted. They must mirror the realities of the work itself.
The grand irony
Across all three conversations, one theme stands out. The HR function leads the charge on wellness—but those working in the domain seldom benefit from it.
Achar calls it the credibility gap. Chopra calls it the culture trap. David calls it context blindness. Different words, same truth: HR burns out while trying to prevent everyone else from burning out.
Perhaps that’s why ‘switching off’ feels so radical—not because it’s new, but because it demands HR to finally walk the talk.
Culture eats boundaries for breakfast
Policies are easy. Practice is harder.
Achar says leaders must model the behaviour first. “If HR doesn’t model balance, no one else will believe it’s truly valued.”
Culture cascades from action, not slogans. The moment leaders reply to midnight messages, silence becomes suspect. “We need leaders who are comfortable with silence,” Achar insists.
Chopra agrees—the organisational system must reward outcomes, not hours. “Rest isn’t rebellion. It’s recovery.”
David adds a pragmatic layer: “Balance must be contextual, not cosmetic. Otherwise, you set people up for guilt instead of growth.”
The real challenge
The day an HR professional tries to switch off becomes a mirror for every employee who has ever stared at their phone on a Sunday night, torn between duty and fatigue.
It teaches that balance isn’t found in days off—it’s found in the discipline of boundaries. It’s not about running away from work. It’s about returning better.
As Achar puts it: “Boundaries don’t keep work away from life. They keep life alive within work.”
And Chopra leaves us with a reality check: “You can’t switch off overnight. But if organisations start respecting time, maybe one day we’ll stop feeling guilty about resting.”
The guilt of resting—of not replying instantly, of logging off at a reasonable hour—has quietly turned into an invisible metric of commitment.
Perhaps that’s the real future of HR’s wellness mission. Not just designing policies that tell others to log off, but finally learning to do it themselves.
Because the real challenge isn’t switching on. It’s learning when—and how—to switch off.
3 Comments
Interesting, Bold and Honest. True to the core. The article has touched the missing part from the “Life of HR”.
HR is the only part of the organisational system that is truly spineless and is a slave to to the system. HR is simply and enforcer for the management and will never do anything to undermine the top leadership. Perhaps the term Human Resources Management should be recoined as Human Resources Control Dept. There is a misconception that HR is the bridge between leadership and the lowest level employee. But in reality HR aloften equates itself as the henchman for the leadership and the employees are the downtrodden. Honestly HR should switch off permanently. Personnel management in the past was a more apt term when the function was to be the platform for the employees to reach management and play on the employees side rather than being a puppet of the leadership as is now
Hi,
It’s all there !
It’s just not HR.. many do suffer from this syndrome of imaginary self importance in arbitrary emergencies.
Me and my team manage things pretty well and are happy about it….. a thing of Friday evening can always wait till Monday morning.
More than work … it’s the people who disturb work more – post hours, offs & hols. Even when not required, people want to know it all , be the first to respond, delegate it further asap… & then feel restless if no one calls, texts, feeds you back or sends you email.
I have seen good number of such people and I am assuming it’s a strange happiness they derive suffering in such manifested emergencies.
Wish they get well soon!