No, the UK is not being held back by ‘woke’ HR managers
A new narrative that blames Britain's woes on HR managers is a perfect encapsulation of how the "war on woke" has become divorced from reality.
Are you keeping track of all the things that are now classed as ‘woke’? I’m struggling to keep up.
So far we’ve had museums, universities, students at universities, National Trust scones, the media, publishing houses, lawyers (but only if they’re based in London and work in human rights, do keep up) and the England football team.
At this point I’d say something about anti-woke warriors throwing the kitchen sink at their anti-woke crusade, were it not for my fear that kitchen sinks will be declared woke next week.
And just when you thought you had the full measure of wokeness, the crusaders have added another item to their list: HR managers.
A new sub-genre of whitepapers and half-baked columns has started to spring up, laying the blame for many of the UK’s economic ills at the feet of HR managers.
I’d argue the contagion started with Kemi Badenoch. When she was running to be leader of the Conservatives, Badenoch co-authored a white paper which argued that, in order for conservatism to win again, it must contend with a new ‘bureaucratic class’ that has a vested interest in ensuring the state gets bigger, not smaller.
The authors of the paper argued that one of the manifestations of this new bureaucratic class was the rise of human resources.
“In 2001, the ONS recorded 119,000 or so people working as personnel managers. By 2023, this had risen to 221,000, an increase of 86%. This happened at a time when productivity rose at historically low levels of 0.8% a year – a third of the long-run average.”
I was then surprised to see the New Statesman (a typically left-liberal magazine) publish a similar argument by one Pamela Dow, a former civil servant.
Dow, in her defence, at least roots her argument in stories of her own attempts to deal with admittedly unwieldy HR executives in the civil service. But her diagnosis of the problem is strikingly similar to Badenoch’s.
Dow starts by highlighting what many economists and policymakers know already: that the UK is grappling with problems of low growth, poor productivity and weak state capacity.
She then goes on to argue that
“Britain is also an international outlier in its dominant and expanding HR sector. We have one of the largest in the world, second only to the Netherlands. HR jobs have been growing steadily in most Western countries but the UK is top of the league (turn over to see tables evidencing this). The British Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows a steady, 83 per cent increase, from just under 300,000 workers in 2011 to more than 500,000 in 2023. Might this also be an explanation for our national sluggishness?”
It’s interesting to note that Dow ends the section I just quoted by posing a question that her article then never actually directly answers. She instead gives the reader a potted history of the HR industry before going on to argue that it’s become so bloated that it’s now shaping business needs, rather than responding to them.”
You might have spotted that both the quotes I’ve shared make a basic mistake that any data scientist would quickly scold you for: confusing correlation with causation.
We are meant to simply attribute the UK’s poor productivity and weak growth to the rise of an HR bureaucratic class because…well…they’ve both happened at the same time. Indeed, if the HR class is such a pernicious force, has anyone checked on workplace productivity in the Netherlands (the only country which has a bigger HR workforce than the UK)?
These pseudo-scientific pieces on the rise of HR bureaucrats have now begun to trickle down into newspaper columns, culminating in The Times columnist Iain Martin arguing that HR has become a
“credentialised monstrosity, gumming up companies and the workings of capitalism.”
Both Dow and Martin also blame HR for causing a vicious cycle, wherein an oversupply of humanities graduates is causing the HR jobs markets to be stuffed with people who bring with them an obsession with ‘woke’ diversity initiatives and social justice campaigns.
This may illustrate “elite overproduction” in the social sciences, or in other words, of too many humanities graduates and not enough jobs for them. It’s worth noting that HR has been the beneficiary in Britain, rather than, for example, teaching. Alongside good pay and job security, in many organisations HR allows influence on high-status topics, incommensurate with position: global social justice and identity campaigns.
In essence, HR thrives because it’s constantly supplied with fresh talent by one of the other powerhouses of woke: universities.
But it was Iain Martin’s column that convinced me to devote an entire edition to this topic. Martin’s diatribe suggests that the slow mission creep of HR bureaucracy is nothing short of existential at a time when
“we desperately need the economy to grow, in a war era when the country is really up against it.”
Martin doesn’t go as far as arguing that HR is making the country so woke and bureaucratic that it can’t adequately fight a war, but he comes pretty damn close.
Of the three articles I’ve explored on the topic, it’s Iain Martin’s which so perfectly crystallises the two big problems with narratives about ‘wokeness’.1
The problem actually lies elsewhere
It’s tempting to see articles like the ones we’ve been discussing as a solution in search of a problem. But the structural problems facing the UK that both Dow and Martin are real. The UK does have a productivity problem. Our growth as a country has been anaemic.
If we’re to believe the Iain Martin thesis, the growth and productivity that British business so desperately needs could be unlocked if HR managers were to magically get out of the way.
But what if the problem lay elsewhere?
Last year, the Chartered Institute of Management partnered with YouGov to research the effect that bad managers have on work cultures.
Their report found that
82% of workers entering management positions have not had any formal management and leadership training, creating an abundance of accidental managers.
According to the research these “accidental managers” are often promoted for the wrong reasons, with nearly half of managers surveyed (46%) believing colleagues won promotions based on internal relationships and profile, rather than their ability and performance.
Managers with formal training are significantly more likely to call out bad behaviour or report concerns or wrongdoing compared to those who have not had any training
Again, we shouldn’t mistake correlation for causation. But if lack of management training is having such a negative effect on UK work cultures, shouldn’t we consider the possibility this is another potential cause of the UK’s economic woes.
My own anecdotal experience has taught that many of the problems with most UK companies can often be traced back to poor management.
It’s not HR’s fault that too many of the senior managers I’ve worked with have called meetings that don’t need to happen, change project priorities on a whim, leave unclear instructions, or generally just have poor emotional control.
There may be some truth in the assertion that you don’t need quite as many HR professionals in the economy. But this demand would surely be eased if there was a greater supply of good managers who were already trained in basic people management practices.
The same is also true of the oversupply of humanities graduates. It’s probably true that too many social sciences graduates enter jobs where their degree isn’t technically necessary. But I speak from years of work experience when I say this is a problem that could be solved by the restoration of proper, joined up careers guidance for school leavers.
But like all the anti-woke crusades, this newfound obsession with HR managers would sooner invent imaginary enemies than deal with genuine structural problems.
The blobby enemies within
Iain Martin does at least attempt to be charitable in his article, acknowledging that there are “good, hardworking and well-motivated people” working in HR.
But if the rise of a bloated, bureaucatic HR class is so all-consuming, how do we know the difference between the ‘good’ HR managers and the bad ones. How many diversity training workshops is too many? At what point does the HR manager who wants to ask the marketing team to post something about Pride Month on the company LinkedIn page make the leap from caring colleague to woke ideologue?
Like almost all of the straw men that cultural conservatives like to attack when they go to war on woke, the attack on HR managers only works if we treat them as one homogenous blob and casually disregard any data that doesn’t currently fit our theory.
With the exception of Dow, my first reaction when I read these various pieces about the rise of the pernicious HR industrial complex was to think “have you actually met an HR manager?”
If you’ve ever dealt with an HR manager during a redundancy consultation, you’ll quickly see that, far from gumming up the machine of capitalism, they’re often the reluctant faces of it. If you’ve ever received a matter of fact email from an HR manager explaining why a company policy can’t be changed, you’ll understand why, unfortunately, they often possess far less institutional muscle than a trade union official.
But most anti-woke zealots don’t care. On its good days, the war on woke brings in valuable clicks and much-sought after ratings. Like all the other objects of their antagonism, it helps if ‘woke’ values are being propagated by enemies that are hard to defeat. If they’re hard to defeat then the war on woke never ends.
In defence of Iain Martin, I think he’s one of the better UK conservative thinkers. But his recent article demonstrates how many good conservatives allow themselves to be captured by these slightly odd, faddish arguments that seem to lack any real intellectual rigour.