What Nigerian HR Professionals Actually Do

Talking, Playing, and Having Fun: The Tweet That Set Off Nigerian HR Professionals

One tweet. A crowd of HR professionals. And enough buried frustration to fill a conference room.

“I still don’t understand what job HR does after hiring,” someone posted online. “I usually see them talking, playing, and having fun with people.”

That was all it took.

The tweet moved quickly through HR circles, and what followed was not the usual polished defense of the profession. It was not the kind of thing you package neatly into a LinkedIn carousel about “the strategic importance of people operations.” It was messier than that. More useful, too.

What poured out over the next few hours was a stream of stories from Nigerian HR professionals who had clearly been waiting for someone — anyone — to ask the wrong question loudly enough.

They talked about being asked to pick up an MD’s birthday cake and deliver it to his house. About doing procurement after the admin resigned. About stepping into accounting after the accountant left. About being told to handle email marketing because the company needed clients, and “you can write.” About being sent to buy diesel in Oregun and distribute it across branches in VI and Fajuyi on a salary of ₦200,000, only to later be asked during appraisal what value they had added to the company.

What emerged was not just a defense of HR. It was a reckoning with the gap between how the profession is perceived and what the work often looks like, especially in Nigerian workplaces, where “HR” can quietly become shorthand for everything nobody else wants to do.

• • •

What the Tweet Got Wrong — and Why It Hit So Hard

The most frustrating thing about the tweet is that it describes something visible.

HR professionals do spend a lot of time talking to people. They are often more physically present across the office than workers in some other departments. They move between teams. They show up at welfare events, send-forths, birthday gatherings, onboarding sessions, difficult conversations, casual check-ins. They are, very often, in motion and in conversation.

To the untrained eye, that can look unserious. Like gist, vibes or work without a visible output.

But that visibility is often the work.

“You go dey advise staff on work-life balance, manager go think say you dey gist or gossip. Na only you know say na the only way staff go open up to you.”

Translation: You’ll be advising staff on work-life balance, and your manager will think you’re just gisting or gossiping. Only you know that’s the only way staff will open up to you.

That line gets at the heart of the profession. Trust is one of the main infrastructures HR runs on, and trust rarely arrives wearing a name tag. It is built slowly; in side conversations, in check-ins, in moments that look casual from the outside. If employees do not trust HR enough to speak openly, they do not raise concerns early. They raise them late, when the issue has become bigger, louder, more expensive, and much harder to fix.

The person chatting with staff at a birthday celebration may be doing far more than socializing. They may be maintaining the relationships that determine whether someone flags a problem early, resigns quietly, or spirals until the issue lands in leadership’s lap as a crisis.

It’s not just office gossip; it's what you’d term preventive maintenance.

That distinction is often poorly understood; not only by outsiders, but also by managers and business owners who rely on HR while underestimating what the function is designed to do.

• • •

The OMB Problem

If there was one recurring villain in the stories that followed, it was the One-Man Business.

Not just a small company. Not even just an under-resourced company. A very specific kind of workplace: one where the founder’s personality is the management structure, strategy changes with mood, and systems are either weak, nonexistent, or permanently under revision.

Otherwise known by the dreaded moniker, OMB. Shudders

“Please, recruiters, write it at the bottom of any job post: IT IS A ONE-MAN BUSINESS. In capital letters, please. Just indicate OMB. We will understand codedly.”

The humour in that line is doing heavy lifting.

Because what people were describing was not merely startup chaos. It was a pattern of dysfunction: businesses where HR is hired not to build people systems but to absorb the human consequences of having none. In those places, the role expands quietly, then violently. Today, you are handling recruitment. Tomorrow, you are coordinating logistics. Next week, you are supervising procurement, plugging admin gaps, managing staff conflict, writing external emails, and somehow still being asked what exactly you do all day.

One person was sent to buy diesel in Oregun and distribute it across branches in VI and Fajuyi. Another was expected to carry the MD’s food in his personal car every day. Another took over accounting after the accountant resigned, and was still questioned at appraisal about their contribution.

All of them were HR.

“Me wey my former OMB oga tell say make I go learn how to drive, despite say I no fit drive, just to assist the company in waybilling spares at the warehouse. HR? Okay, okay… Na kuku HR gbogbolowo.”

Translation: My former OMB boss actually told me to go and learn how to drive — after I had already told him I couldn’t — just so I could help the company with waybills for spare parts at the warehouse. As an HR? Apparently, everything is HR.

That line is funny in the way many Nigerian work stories are funny: because if you do not laugh, you may have to scream.

The stories become less amusing when you look at the pay attached to them. One person described a role that had expanded to include procurement, admin, and email marketing on a salary of ₦200,000. Another had half their salary deducted because they left work to write a professional examination. They resigned the same day. Their manager begged them to stay, but they still had to leave. The worst part is the short-lived nature of these jobs, such that they can’t count toward your experience.

Some jobs are so chaotic, so exploitative, so spiritually draining that by the time you leave, you do not even want to remember them professionally.

• • •

The Respect Deficit

Under the diesel errands, cake deliveries, and job creep sits a more serious problem: many Nigerian workplaces have not decided what HR is actually for.

In organizations that understand the function, HR is not just there to hire, onboard, and issue queries. It is involved in workforce planning, compensation, performance systems, organizational design, retention, culture, employee relations, and leadership accountability. It sits close enough to decision-making to influence the conditions people work under, not merely react to them after the fact.

In many of the stories shared here, HR had none of that power.

Instead, it looked more like administration with emotional labour attached. HR was expected to enforce policies it did not design, smooth over decisions it did not make, and absorb the fallout of leadership failures it was never given the authority to prevent.

“I noticed low performance, poor KPI, high attrition rate. Omo, I wan fess craze. Nobody teach me to commot from being reserved and calm. You gars talk to engage staff by force. Them no dey tell person.”

The testimony points to another truth that is often left out of professional descriptions of the field: HR work can alter a person’s emotional life. It can force quiet people into relentless visibility and turn private people into mediators of everybody else’s distress. It can demand constant relational labour while giving very little institutional protection in return.

Nobody tells you how exhausting it is to become the person everyone brings their frustration to, while still having little control over the decisions that caused that frustration in the first place.

One person described resigning and then rejecting two job offers, not because the jobs were bad on paper, but because they needed to recover before going anywhere else.

“It breaks me o. I rejected interview invites, even job offers from two consulting companies, after all the stress I went through during the interview process. I’m just healing. ”

There is a tendency to discuss burnout as though it is abstract, clinical, and easy to identify. But often it looks like this: somebody who cannot bring themselves to step back into the cycle, even when another offer is waiting.

• • •

What the Good Version Looks Like

Not every testimony in the thread was bleak.

Some people had worked in organizations where HR was properly understood, where there was an actual department rather than a lone person carrying every people-related burden, where managers listened, and where the function had enough authority to do the work it was supposed to do.

The lesson from those stories was consistent: if you do not define your role early, the organization will do it for you. And once it decides you are available for everything, it becomes difficult to reverse.

“Believe me, if they sense they can bully you, oga, they will bully you for life. As a professional, let your management know that you are good and they can trust your judgment.”

That is useful advice, though it also reveals the unfairness of the situation. It places a structural problem on the individual worker. One person’s professionalism cannot, by itself, fix an unserious company. A calm, competent HR professional in a badly run OMB may still end up buying diesel, carrying cakes, and patching holes in systems they did not break.

Still, the green flags were clear enough.

Start your career in a structured place if you can. Work somewhere with an actual HR team. Find a manager who understands that staff engagement, relationship-building, and being visibly present in the life of the organization are not “extra.” They are part of the function.

“Start your career in a good establishment ooo. Na me know how I dey suffer cultural shock sha.”

It sounds casual, but it is hard-earned advice. The wrong first workplace can teach you the wrong shape of the profession.

• • •

More Than the Department of Vibes

The tweet that triggered all this probably still exists online as a throwaway opinion. But the response it provoked revealed something bigger than the tweet itself.

A lot of people genuinely think HR is the department of vibe; the people with the warm smiles, birthday calendars, welcome emails, and suspiciously unclear deliverables. What they often fail to understand is that the most difficult part of the job done well can look deceptively soft from the outside.

An HR function that is visible, relational, and embedded in the human life of the workplace is not evidence that nothing is happening. It is often evidence that someone is doing difficult labour that does not announce itself through dashboards and spreadsheets.

The professionals who responded to the tweet know that because many of them learned it in the hardest possible way: in OMBs, in toxic workplaces, in under-structured organizations, in roles that kept expanding until they became the answer to every operational inconvenience.

Most of them are still in the profession. That, in the end, may be the strongest answer to the tweet.

Not because the job is easy. Or because it is glamorous. Certainly not because it is always respected. But because someone still has to do the work of holding the human side of an organization together; even when everybody else is too busy calling it “talking, playing, and having fun.”

—

Testimonies have been lightly edited for clarity. Names and identifying details have been withheld.