I remember sitting in my father in law’s office. I was a spotty 30 year-old executive so this would have been around 2001. We were discussing HR, the bane of his life. He ran an oil and gas Engineering Recruitment Business and was bemoaning that he increasingly had to work with HR teams rather than the managers he used to supply to and there was a serious gap in the technical and market knowledge of the HR recruiters who typically had never even seen an oil rig or well, let alone understood how they worked. This was one of the periods in the industry when corporate procurement teams decide that staffing can be commoditised so they write large contracts with the likes of Capita and, well, it doesn’t go well. Eventually they realise this doesn’t work before going back to basics only for the same to creep in over the next five to 10 years. Over the 30 or so years of my career I have seen this cycle rinse and repeat again and again.
At the time, my father in law pointed to a shelf on the wall of his office. There, in all its glory, was a dust covered series of bound volumes of papers from Croners. This was the HR bible for small businesses. If you needed any help or advice, you’d simply reach for Croners and the answer would be there. Every month, Croners would post out update pages and you would swap out the old ones for the new.
My father in law only opened Croners when he was hiring someone or managing sick leave. Mostly they remained closed, only ever opened monthly when his PA would swap out the old for the updates.
Then, around 2010, when the Equality Act came in we started to see an increase in the amount of time, but also the amount of expertise required to navigate HR. Croner’s volumes were no longer sufficient. A new breed of service provider emerged – the freelance HR Consultant, offering services to small businesses. Since then the burden has continued to increase. The paradox here being that the laws and administrative functions required to comply with them have pretty much all been designed for larger employers with the in-house specialists to manage. The paradox being that the majority of British workers work in Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which are under 250 employees and unlikely to have such expertise in house.
Now none of this is necessarily unusual. Anyone running a small business knows that the lobbying power of big business has seen a huge increase in the burden of bureaucracy; this was a particular feature of the EU. It is in the interest of big business to increase the burden of statutory administration, knowing that smaller competitors cannot afford to implement it. Sadly, Parliament has proven remiss in protecting the small business sector; those entrusted to represent us have been less than on top of this. The culmination being the open favouring of big businesses over small during the lockdowns and the largest transfer of wealth in history.
So back to HR in small businesses. We know that the introduction of Equality (or is it Equity?) Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies and ESG policies driven by activist organisations has been disastrous for the British economy. The figures are in, supported by the Dynata survey data from the Free Speech Union and the Department For Business and Trade report in March 2024.
However, employers continue to push these policies and demand compliance from their workforce. As I highlighted in my article last week, this is having serious real-world consequences to the tune of several hundred thousand losing their jobs for essentially having the ‘wrong opinions’. ESG initiatives have EDI baked into them – if a large business wants funding from somewhere like Blackrock, then it needs to agree to implement ESG as a condition of the funding. This inevitably means driving EDI and other ‘initiatives’ down the supply chain. Supply paper clips to a FTSE250? Well you now need to show you have a raft of policies in your business, no matter how small, including EDI and the associated training. It’s the same in the public sector. It is all very well for Kemi Badenoch to highlight the problems with this but NHS trusts and others in the public sector are pushing the same to their suppliers.
This is how EDI is pushed into small businesses. It’s usually done by buying ‘off the shelf’ training or bringing in an EDI consultancy, usually staffed by activists, which then quickly trains the staff in ideologies like Critical Race Theory and Radical Trans Allyship. As the Government report quoted above highlights, EDI is extremely complex and it is very easy, through lack of time or resources, to get it wrong and for it to backfire horribly on your business leading to the devastating number of sackings and other negative outcomes. 65% of British workers report that they have received ideologically skewed training in EDI despite most British workers working in SMEs.
How on earth are small businesses meant to navigate all this without time and resources? Furthermore, if they have inadvertently damaged their business by, with the best intentions, implementing EDI which has destroyed employee and colleague relationships, how can they fix this?
This is why I and my team have launched www.fairjob.co.uk, an accreditation and support service for small businesses which is there to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and other complex areas of HR. The service is aimed at small businesses and is priced to make it as affordable as possible.
So if the burden of HR, recalcitrant activist employees, constant political tension at work, distrust, intolerance and fear is undermining your business, get in touch with us. We can help. Subscriptions for the smallest businesses start at £190 + VAT per annum.
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. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.
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Brilliant stuff!
And one of the many reasons why the conservative party is in for a major stuffing.
They have done nothing about ‘Blair’s Britain’ except make it worse.
Massive deregulation has been required since 2010.
The yardstick should be the 1990 tax and regulatory framework, a bare minimum goal.
Yes, it appears that the late 1980s were as good as it got. The period since has been characterised by rapid acceleration towards civilisational collapse. Perhaps it’s still possible to get back to 1990 settings but it will be the mother of all battles.
If you have a bunch of invertebrate politicians so utterly pathetically weak they folded rather than tell teachers and unions children need to be in school during the pandemic, if you have a bunch of politicians so scared of being painted as “the bad guys” by extremist leftist ideologues, they folded over trans and gender issues and would rather deny reality than confront the issue, if you have a bunch of invertebrate politicians so utterly, vilely pathetic as to allow our children to be raped in the tens of thousands rather than stand-up to the very worst kind of pedophiles and racists and bigots, just because they happen to be primarily of one skin colour and one religion, then, really, where is the surprise these same people are unable to stop the insane expansion of the nanny state bureaucracy (they never will do).
They are the modern day Tower of Babel.
We need a tsunami of some kind to wash the lot of them away.
The collectivists are intent on politicising every aspect of life and corporatising all economic activity. Small businesses must be punished and controlled along with motorists, free thinkers, and anyone else disinclined to follow the diktats of the collectivists. The HR function is in the vanguard of the collectivists’ war on individual freedom. HR functionaries are evil scum.
It seems there is at least one ‘HR functionary’ reading the comments.
not ‘Evil scum’.. there are certainly bad eggs, activists and grifters who see an opportunity to exploit these policies for their own ends. The reality is that most simply want to get on with their jobs and, like most people out there, don’t think about what they are actually doing. Many actually think they are doing the right thing – lied and hoodwinked by activists.
Bureaucracies will expand unless deliberately checked and in large employers, HR is just that, detached from operational delivery or sales, it increasingly exists to enforce agendas rather than protect the business and workers by supporting the other functions. The real villains here are the NGOs and investment firms driving ESG. They impose ESG on smaller companies by insisting that they implement EDI and other radical and highly politicalised ideologies on their staff and supply chains. This is a cynical move because EDI demonstrably causes major issues especially at smaller companies – why would a corporate want to drive small businesses out of the market? Market share, kill competition and increase the profits of the Blackrocks of the world,
£190+vat. Talk about follow the money..only jesting. Keep up the good work.
It does look beneficial but it’s a workaround where a fix is needed.
The reality is that there won’t be a fix. Certainly none anytime soon. The Conservative government have proved inept because they lacked the will to take on the quangocracy that Blair left behind. The activist NGOs who have radicalised and politicised the civil service and the kritocracy of the Supreme Court.
The reason why we have launched http://www.fairjob.co.uk is because we cannot wait for the politicians to fix this. They have known about the problem for at least 15 years and nothing has happened, in fact, it has got worse.
The ONLY way we are going to be able to change this is to drive it from our end. This is why FairJobUK isn’t just a consultancy to support employers, it is an initiative to drive change through membership, sharing experiences and ideas and to give SMEs and other small businesses a banner to unite behind. This is why we are pricing it to be as accessible as possible. FairJobUK is also a business network and our goal is to provide members with a voice where the FSB and others have failed.
The war against Cultural Marxism cannot be lost. If it is, we might as well not have bothered in 1939. We should all just have accepted defeat and put a signed photograph of the Fuhrer on our Fireplace wall.
Fireplaces are verboten; heat pump for you.
Das ist nicht ein problem mein Fuhrer
EDI is such an unfortunate 3 letter combination. Easy to reformat as IED (you know, the sort of thing that blows up) or DIE (that is the unfortunate frequent effect of an IED).
Interesting. I’ve had a chance to read about the FairJob pledge and service now and the pledge and the idea of accreditation is almost exactly like something I emailed the FSU to suggest a few months back. I hope it takes off – I am going to forward to the Big Boss at my firm.
We launch this weekend and are offering a 15% discount on annual subs for year one during our opening week