It’s funny how invisibility doesn’t come from silence. It often arrives dressed in efficiency. Every day, I log in before the rest of the world blinks awake. Five companies. Five sets of policies. Five flavors of culture. Five hundred employees, give or take, scattered across geographies and job grades. Their birthdays, grievances, absences, warnings, exits, promotions, insurance queries, payroll escalations all of it, mine. I handle it all. I keep it moving. The engine stays warm because I never stop.

And yet, no one knows my name. Not in the way it matters. Not beyond a transactional "Hi HR" in an email. Not beyond the polite “please escalate this” on Slack. I’m a floating entity in signatures. A functional address in a contact list. The person they need, but never truly see. My inbox isn’t addressed to a human; it’s addressed to a role.

In the world of HR shared services, you become a background process. Your success lies in not being noticed. If everything runs well, you disappear. If something goes wrong, you’re suddenly very visible but only as the first one blamed.

I wasn’t always like this. When I started in HR, I thought the role meant relationships. I imagined one office, one team, one group of people I’d grow to know deeply. I dreamed of being part of birthday cakes and farewell speeches, part of performance reviews that changed lives. I thought I’d be invited to offsites, not just send calendar blocks for them.

But shared services doesn’t work like that. We’re the engine room of the ship. Never on deck, always on call. We see everything, feel everything, but stay behind the curtain. And while this model is brilliant for operational efficiency and cost cutting, it often misses one crucial ingredient: identity.

I’ve onboarded people who never knew I existed. Processed resignations for people I never spoke to once. Advised managers on sensitive terminations while eating lunch at my desk between back to back video calls. I know people’s salary structures, their medical histories, their family emergencies but they don’t know my face.

“Hi HR, please look into this.”
That’s how every story begins. Every frustration, every mistake, every form they didn’t read. And yet, I keep showing up. Because even when they don’t know my name, I know theirs.

I’ve handled five companies in a single day without mixing up policies, sometimes even switching my tone based on their internal culture. One startup demands informality, the other prefers precision. One appreciates emojis, the other calls them unprofessional. I shapeshift constantly. No applause, no recognition. Just quiet, consistent competence.

But let me tell you this invisibility comes at a price. There are days when I crave acknowledgement. Not applause, not awards just a little human recognition. A message that says, “Thanks, (with my name on it). A manager remembering my name without scrolling through his inbox. An employee writing, “I appreciate your quick help last time,” instead of firing off another cold email.

HR burnout is real, and in shared services, it’s strangely amplified. You’re expected to be deeply empathetic and completely unpersonal. You handle emotional events like layoffs, deaths, divorces but you do it without presence, without connection. Like a ghost, you’re there, but not really.

The emotional labor of HR is often overlooked, and in shared services, it gets buried under layers of anonymity. When you don’t have a face, people forget you have feelings too. They assume efficiency is emotionless. That precision is robotic. That just because you aren’t physically in the room, you aren’t carrying the weight of the conversation.

I’ve cried after calls where employees broke down. I’ve sat in silence after handling a grievance that mirrored my own life. I’ve felt overwhelmed, overworked, overlooked. And yet, I return. Because I still believe in the purpose, even when the position erases my personhood.

This isn’t about self pity. It’s about awareness. It’s about putting a spotlight on the shared services model that companies love for its scalability but forget to humanize. Behind every process is a person. Behind every ticket is a tired HR executive who just wants to be treated with kindness.

HR shared services professionals are the silent heroes of modern organizations. We ensure the forms are right, the payrolls are clean, the audits pass, the deadlines are met. We do all this without stepping into your office even once. But that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to be acknowledged.

Recognition isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about remembering that “HR” is not a bot. It’s about replying with a name, saying thanks, or simply asking, “How are you holding up?” It’s about restoring humanity to a system that is dangerously close to becoming transactional beyond repair. I’m not asking to be seen for glory. I’m asking to be seen as human. I don’t want a seat at your party. I want to be invited to the conversation.

Because someday, when your policies are praised, your culture admired, your retention celebrated you’ll want to thank HR. And when that moment comes, I hope you’ll know my name