How HR Turned Workplaces Woke

In my article earlier this week I argue that the real danger to Western society isn’t necessarily the absurd hate speech laws the likes of Humza Yousaf and Justin Trudeau dream up. It’s the pernicious creep of a political monoculture within the workplace and society as a whole. It’s the catastrophically chilling effect it has on freedom of speech and expression.

On Thursday morning in the Daily Telegraph the U.K.’s Business Secretary, Kemi Badenoch had an article discussing the catastrophic impact of DEI policies in the workplace – how well-meaning employers have become enforcers of radical ideologies to the point that they are actually breaking employment law through breaching the Equality Act 2010.

HR departments rightly get a lot of the blame for this, however, the majority of HR workers are just as cowed and bullied as everyone else is. They don’t necessarily agree with the policies they are being asked to implement and enforce, but if they don’t demonstrate enthusiastic commitment to doing just that they can say goodbye to promotion and can expect their name to appear on the next redundancy consultation list.

What Kemi misses is that DEI is now so baked into the culture of the British workplace that without specific legislation protecting the political beliefs and the right to a private life for British workers, it will be impossible to remove. It didn’t emerge with the radical activist groups which have targeted our institutions with ‘training’; the framework such organisations have used to peddle their ideologies was set up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

So the legend goes, it was in the early 1990s that the HR team at British Airways led the charge to shift HR from being the ‘personnel’ function it had traditionally been to become a proactive operational department within an organisation. Using policies that actively engaged with the employees, a positive business culture could be developed putting the customer front and centre. As part of this the team introduced the ‘Competency and Behaviour Matrix’. This listed the professional skill levels and corporate behaviours that were expected from each level of seniority in the business.

A corporate behaviour could be “Leadership” and the scale would go from “shows initiative in the team” to “is able to inspire and lead a large, complex, multi-skilled team”. Other behaviours would be “Collaboration and Teamwork” or “Customer Service”. Job interviews and promotion appraisals included meetings with HR where questions like “Can you describe a time when you demonstrated extraordinary leadership?” would be asked and the answer graded against the matrix. The HR team at BA was roundly praised for this initiative and it did produce results. Members of the team moved on and the initiative was spread throughout our large employers. By the late noughties it was seen as best practice.

I first came across it when working a contract at Transport for London 20 years ago. However, by then a new behaviour had been added to the matrix: “Diversity Equality and Inclusion” with levels like “Demonstrates inclusivity in team management ensuring all members feel valued”.

By 2012 the DEI column started having very specific identity related questions: “How do you ensure opportunities for disabled people in your team?”

By 2018 it was: “How do you ensure LGBT+ people feel welcomed and valued in your team?” “How do you embed a culture of racial equity in your team?”

Like all of our professional institutions, the Institute of Personal Development (the IPD), HR’s ‘professional association’, has baked DEI into the training for all studying professional HR qualifications.

Increasingly the U.K. workplace and therefore our society is being split between the graduate management class and the workers. HR has become the clerisy for the management class, driving and enforcing uniformity of opinion. It has become the Inquisition on the workers, those ‘not on message’. Like so much of our society, a framework initiative initially designed to benefit the workplace has been corrupted by a radically toxic ideology and weaponised by a minority of ideological zealots to spread that ideology.

Badenoch’s article also ignores the real world consequences for businesses and our broader economy. The West has been successful because freedom drove creativity and ideas were spawned by mavericks, people who broke the mould. The workplace culture we have created in our companies demotes and fires anyone who doesn’t ‘toe the line’ with the modern orthodoxies. The fact of the matter is that those who come up with the good ideas in business are the dissidents, the disruptors, the passionate. The workplace HR has created is failing workers, their employers and our national economy because those people are isolated, sidelined and silenced. Those who are promoted are the appeasers, the cowards and the mediocre.

Woe betide any worker who does not enthusiastically embrace and indeed actively promote their employer’s DEI policies. At best you will be isolated and sidelined. At worst you’ll be next on the redundancy list.

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations.