A shadow HR empire now runs Britain – and it’s only getting bigger, writes the Telegraph‘s Employment Editor, Lucy Barton. She continues:
HR workers currently outnumber NHS doctors by around three to one, with the number of workers in the sector rising 42pc between 2011 and 2021, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
That’s four times the growth rate of the general workforce. I wrote in these pages three years ago that militant HR departments were the new trade unions, having transformed during the pandemic into one of the most powerful departments in business.
The focus has gone from hiring and firing to playing the role of union, mentor and doctor. “Your head of HR is now basically the school nurse,” the New York Times noted in 2022. HR wants you to bring your “whole self” into work, whether you like that idea or not.
Of course, all of that would be hunky-dory, if it meant that people were happier and productivity was up. But neither is the case. Despite having one of the largest HR sectors in the world, Britain is suffering from low productivity and a worklessness crisis driven by mental health problems and long-term sickness.
Workers in Britain are worse off than they were in 2008 as the country lags behind the rest of the rich world, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned last week.
Productivity growth across Britain is poor, particularly in the public sector where it is lower than it was in 1997 – the year Google.com was first registered as a domain name. Output per hour worked in the UK has risen by just 5.6pc in the past decade, compared to almost 25pc in the decade before the financial crisis, according to official figures.
HR is perceived to be the least productive department within most organisations, a poll conducted by software provider Ciphr found earlier this year.
As senior civil servant Pamela Dow wrote in her article for the New Statesman last week, as HR roles have increased, “so too have the number of tribunals and days lost to work-related illness, while productivity has flatlined”.
She added: “HR expansion is not coinciding with desirable things and appears to be coinciding with undesirable ones.” Raising the alarm about the size, remit and seniority of HR functions, she noted how when she worked in the Cabinet Office in 2022, there were 1,000 HR officials in the “Government People Group”.
Humanities graduates have also flooded into the sector at the expense of areas such as teaching, she added, arguing that a degree should not be necessary.
There is nothing wrong with large, influential HR teams if they are a driving force for good – but productivity needs to be part of the conversation and there needs to be more thought behind some of these initiatives.
Asking staff to imagine being an “elderly Japanese gay grandfather” as one workplace did really doesn’t increase empathy or make work a nicer and more productive place to be.
Much of this stuff just feels like a box-tick exercise put in place simply so that a company is harder for staff to sue. There has also been a concerning rise in groupthink on both sides of the Atlantic – a 90-year-old woman in California who had volunteered for a charity for 60 years was told this year that her services were no longer needed after she asked a colleague why she needed to add the pronouns “she/her” to her email signature.
There needs to be a reset before Britain’s HR club grows again – expectations of sweeping job cuts and a looming workers’ rights overhaul mean this rise is inevitable.
Companies terrified of staff lawsuits are pouring cash into this space. Luke Johnson, the chairman of Gail’s, last week warned MPs how hard it will be for companies with small HR teams to digest the Government’s “big new bill of 150 pages” on employment rights.
Small businesses are terrified of accidentally getting things wrong as pressures rise. The HR industry should be asking itself the same question.
Worth reading in full.
