Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

South African employees are running hot. 71% report being disengaged, and 73% are stressed. 56% of SA women aged 18-25 say they're burnt out, well below their global peers. Then Q1 2026 dropped 345,000 jobs from the economy and pushed unemployment back to 32.7%, so anyone still employed is doing more with the same.

And one team in the business is catching all of that, from both directions.

Your HR function.

HR plays two sides of the field

On one side, they absorb the strain coming up from the workforce; burnout cases, exit interviews and the messages from managers who can't cope. On the other hand, they deliver the calls coming down from exco: the retrenchments, the consequence management, the freezes on hiring or salary increases.

Then they walk back into the canteen.

That double-sided pressure is now showing up in the data.

The number that should stop you

Cape Peninsula University of Technology researchers just surveyed 317 SA HR professionals via the SABPP using the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale, the standard global measure. 83% report moderate to high impostor feelings. A quarter sits in the "frequent" band. Three per cent rate it as intense.

This isn't a confidence problem. It's a load problem.

And it falls heavier on some shoulders than others. The study found the score moves significantly with age: Younger HR professionals carry it worse. Pair that with the SA reality that junior HR are the ones running early-career retrenchment conversations right now, and the picture sharpens.

The Fair Pay Bill closed its public comment window last Friday. If it passes, three things will change in every SA boardroom: Employers can no longer ask for past payslips, job adverts must publish salary ranges, and any clause forbidding employees from discussing pay becomes unenforceable.

That last one is the exco problem. Wage secrecy is what's protected SA pay decisions for decades, letting two people doing the same job earn different amounts because nobody could prove it. When that secrecy disappears, every previous pay call has to defend itself out loud. CFOs and CHROs are about to spend a lot of time explaining structures that were never built to be seen.

The question worth sitting with: When everyone in your business can finally see what everyone earns, what does your pay structure tell them about who you really value?

51%

is the share of South African HR leaders who say their CEO fully trusts them to make tough leadership calls. This is according to a Mentimeter survey of nearly 200 senior HR execs at the 2026 CHRO Day, and it implies that 49% of HRs don’t feel trusted. The same survey identified financial performance as the number-one pressure HR leaders are being asked to deliver on, ahead of innovation, culture, retention and wellbeing. In short, many SA HR pros must carry the weight of expectation but none of the authority that should come with it.

Source: CHRO South Africa, 19 May 2026

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