Via a Twitter correspondent, a piece by Toby Young in The Spectator on Accenture’s wokeness:

New employees at the British headquarters of Accenture, a global management consultancy, were slightly taken aback during a recent induction morning when the head of human resources encouraged them to wear rainbow-coloured lanyards declaring themselves ‘allies’ — not just at the meeting, but permanently. In addition, they were given the option of adding the word ‘ally’ in the same rainbow pattern to the footers of their company email addresses. Anyone confused by HR language — a reference to the second world war perhaps? — was referred to the company website, where the word ‘ally’ was helpfully defined: ‘An ally is someone who takes action to promote an inclusive and accepting culture regardless of their own identity and demonstrates commitment to an inclusive workplace. We currently have allies programmes for Mental Health, LGBT and People with Disabilities.’

It’s not just politics that’s becoming infantalised with cheap gimmickry, it’s everywhere. There is some good news, though:

This madness, which long ago infected university campuses, is now seeping into HR departments of large employers. The result is the rise of the woke corporation, and it might affect the way you work. Certainly, no one should assume that their own company, however sensible-seeming, is immune.

Crackpot ideas that used to be confined to neo-Marxist professors in grievance studies departments have been enthusiastically embraced by the giants of capitalism. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola are all on board and anyone who publicly challenges this new orthodoxy is not merely endangering their chances of promotion, but at risk of being fired.

And that is that companies which operate like this will not survive long once their legacy rents run out. As I’m fond of saying, it’s small and medium-sized companies which reject this garbage or turn it to their advantage which represent the future for bright, capable individuals.

Maybe my readers can help me out here. I’m researching the link between gender diversity and company performance, and having read about 20 academic papers on the subject I’m now looking at studies various companies have done. Currently I’m on this one (.pdf) from Credit Suisse, in which they evaluate 3,400 companies across 10 sectors in 40 countries including 27,000 CEOs and senior executives. This graph on page 25 is confusing me:

If you were to plot the share prices of two random companies, you’d not expect them to follow the same path. If you were to plot the share prices of two companies in the same industrial sector exposed to much the same market forces, you’d perhaps expect to see them follow similar paths. But how likely is it that you take 3,400 companies across 10 sectors and 40 countries, divide them into baskets depending on the number of women in senior management, plot the share prices and they all have roughly the same shape?

Given the only differentiation between the baskets is the number of women in senior management, I’d have expected each line to be of a different shape, reflecting the combined fortunes of each individual company in each sector in each country. Is this a complete fudge, or am I missing something here?

Allow me to pluck excerpts from two comments from beneath my post on HR robots. The first from MJW:

To get into senior management/exec ranks they need patronage. Ability and tacit understanding is not so crucial as decisions made may destroy the organisation, just not immediately, anything likely to cause immediate damage should be routed to an underling who understands what they are doing. If the senior manager/exec knows what they are doing it’s a brucey bonus, if they don’t it doesn’t matter, the ‘managerialist’ approach treats the business does as a black box administered by generic techniques.

 

Rotating senior managers/execs through posting for ‘for experience’ is mainly done to boost CVs so their patron can elevate them if/when opportunity to put one of their clients in place emerges. It also helps to diffuse accountability and protect both client and patron.

The second from Fay:

Managers were informed by HR that they could no longer rate employees as “outstanding”.

These two comments are actually talking about the same problem. The golden boys and girls who are fast-tracked to senior management need to give something back to their patron that they can wave around as proof their prodigy deserves such rapid promotion. The best thing they can offer besides hours of grovelling to senior management is an “Outstanding” score on their annual appraisal – the highest level. If the prodigy scores Outstanding in successive years, the patron can point to it when haggling for his golden child to take the next plum position, and use it to fend off their detractors. This got to the point where the golden children would be pretty much guaranteed to get an Outstanding score, no doubt due to pressure from the patron on the manager doing the appraisal. Perhaps that’s not even necessary: most managers are fully aware if they have a golden child in their team and get with the programme of not doing anything which might upset their ascendancy. Who knows, they might need to call in a favour sometime in future?

This was working well until someone decided a few years back that too many people were getting Outstanding scores. With brown-nosing so ubiquitous and modern managers wanting the love from their team they can’t get from their wives, pretty much everybody was scoring well on the appraisals (it’s also quite hard to mark someone down if they turn up and merely do the job). Hell, even I got reasonably good appraisals. So they tweaked the system and decided only a certain percentage of people could get an Outstanding score.

What this meant was the patrons in senior management advance-booked these scores for their golden children and issued instructions to the middle management that no mere pleb could score Outstanding, regardless of actual performance. I was in the room when this was announced and I twigged straight away what had happened and started laughing (it’s not like it would affect me). But a lot of people, especially those who probably deserved the highest appraisal grade, were absolutely livid and rightly so. For fun I asked our department manager how any appraisal system worthy of the description can eliminate an outcome before it’s even started, and all I got was a pathetic shrug and bleating that “this is what management have said”.

It seems that with Fay’s anecdote, this wasn’t only happening in my company. What made it worse is the quota system made it necessary for managers to assign bad appraisal scores to people as well. I was a ripe target for that but I could tell my manager had no stomach for the sort of battle he’d have if he tried that on me, so we tacitly agreed I’d get a middle-ranking score. Instead, he hauled in the quietly spoken Asian bloke and spent two hours coming up with one excuse after another as to why his performance had been rubbish that year.

Welcome to modern management, and modern HR.

One of my observations through my career has been that HR, in the main, is either a remote bureaucracy which might as well be staffed by Martians or a rather dim soul whose jaw hangs half open and does whatever management tells him or her. In the larger companies it’s been the former that prevailed, to the point many HR tasks were outsourced to an office in another country and everyday issues were governed by bulky procedures written by unknown authors who probably couldn’t say what the company does.

This probably doesn’t matter so much when it comes to stuff like contracts, payroll, and holidays but increasingly such personal matters as career progression, recruitment, and even appraisals are getting handled by people who don’t appear to have ever seen the operational side of the business. I’m of the opinion – which might be completely wrong – that businesses which outsource basic human management duties which used to be intrinsic to a line manager’s role are going to end up as bloated, unwieldy bureaucracies filled with unthinking drones who know all about the hierarchy’s latest wheeze but no idea how their activities contribute to the bottom line (assuming they do). As I’ve discussed on here before, I reckon smart, ambitious young folk will start avoiding the behemoths in favour of smaller, more nimble organisations – or they’ll start their own and work in the gig economy. My move into HR was in large part about bridging the gap between operations and HR in order to help a small company grow without creating a sprawling HR bureaucracy which sends anyone capable running for the exit.

I was therefore probably the wrong person to attend a presentation by an HR specialist in a major consulting firm, who wanted to tell us how automation, computers, and AI is going to revolutionise how companies manage their human resources. Now some of it is obvious, such as the aforementioned contracts, holiday approval, etc. and is ripe for automation. But I was rather surprised to see some of the functions which workers currently detest being handled by an HR drone who might as well be a robot are soon going to be done by an actual robot. One example he gave was a version of the MS-Word paperclip answering questions from an employee about their career aspirations and suggesting suitable training programmes. I can’t imagine any ambitious employee with an ounce of self-respect interacting with an automated chat bot to obtain career advice.

One of the biggest complaints I used to hear from my erstwhile colleagues was about the career management system. You’d be assigned someone who doesn’t know you and, if they’ve read your CV, doesn’t care about anything which occurred before you showed up on their doorstep. Most of the time they have no expertise in the positions they are trying to fill, nor the knowledge to appraise an individual’s skills. My career manager had worked her whole life as a translator before being put in charge of the careers of dozens of project engineers and managers. The thing is, it doesn’t really matter: in many large companies, particularly oil companies, the golden boys and girls are hand-picked early on and their careers carefully managed with plum postings while everyone else is just a pleb who gets slotted in wherever they fit, or don’t. For the vast majority “career management” is simply a charade to convince people they have a chance of promotion and recognition. This is why it’s managed by the cheapest person they can find, and it might as well be done by a robot. The same is true for annual appraisals: it’s blindingly obvious to everyone that managers and employees just go through the motions, and treat the whole thing as a painful admin exercise which must be completed before Christmas after which nothing changes. They are becoming increasingly automated, and eventually will be fully so. You can imagine what value an automated employee appraisal system adds, aside from ticking a compliance box that they get carried out. And if companies are going to automate recruitment, I can’t see it bringing an end to the laments of department managers who are kept out of the process and sent candidates that are hopelessly unsuited to the position.

I stuck my paw in the air and asked whether increasing the already giant chasm between flesh-and-blood workers and HR is a good idea and got an interesting response. Firstly I was told that companies aren’t stupid and they wouldn’t do anything which would harm their operations and upset their staff. That HR functions have already been taken away from line management and given to remote, sprawling bureaucracies ought to give lie to that statement. The second was that the move to automation and AI will free up HR resources to concentrate on those more important, human-related tasks. What those were we weren’t told, but I made the point that unless HR actually knows something about the job the workers do, freeing up resources won’t help. HR is not short of resources, they’re short of knowledge and competence. I’m not sure this remark went down very well.

I suspect what’s happening is this. The consultants have come up with very clever software which they’re now flogging to big companies, whose HR directors see a way to reduce costs, get rid of annoying admin tasks, and boost their prestige by being owners of a fancy IT system. Senior managers in big companies are suckers for big tech solutions, which is why there are fleets of high-end Porsches in the car parks of consulting companies. They’ll adopt this software and fire a few drones, but they won’t save costs. Firstly, many HR departments exist to provide jobs: a proper business review would have got rid of them regardless of technological progress. Secondly, the HR personnel who are now free of the admin burdens will turn their attention to more pressing matters – such as sexual harassment trainings and diversity workshops. I’m sure this will cheer the workforce up no-end.

The one thing missing from this architecture was any solid link in knowledge and experience between HR and what the company actually does. Apparently workers were consulted by the designers of these systems, and I daresay in some cases this was done properly and good feedback obtained. But the whole thing looked to me like a top-down, Soviet-style project where clever people sit in a room and design a system to serve tens of thousands of people they’ve never met and couldn’t even describe, and they’ve done it so brilliantly it can be applied anywhere regardless of industry. And the difference between what this and what we have now is it removes every last trace of human contact and understanding. How will this turn out, do you think?

It’s rather ironic that the new era of human resource management, in which whole ranges of human behaviours, desires, and emotions are supposedly considered, is reckoned by experts to be best managed by an algorithm. I waved my paw in the air again and pointed out there’s somewhat of a contradiction between saying businesses must become more touchy-feely as Millennials join who want to feel special and valued from the outset, and mass-managing all personal issues with a robot. But someone piped up and said they were a Millennial and they didn’t care who processed their payroll. Which is true, but they might care who – or what – decides you can’t change department, alter your workload, or complain about how your boss communicates with you.

I daresay these automated HR systems will become the norm in large companies, increasing the gap between them and those outfits which actually do the productive work in any given industry. And they will be yet one more reason for smart, ambitious young people to avoid huge corporations and go somewhere smaller, or work for themselves.

A reader sends me a job advert. Look at the bottom:

Simply apply through seek today with your CV. Once we have reviewed your details we will ask you to apply online through our Johnson Controls job portal. You will then be contacted by the Branch Manager as appropriate for an interview. Good Luck!

So if HR like the look of you, you can do their admin work by putting all your details into their database. Presumably they’re too busy to do it themselves, what with all that diversity coordination and training Kiwi fire protection specialists require.

You see this with a lot of what are laughably called “support functions” in companies: they exist mainly to deal with administration but write their procedures in such a way the admin burden is put back on the workforce. I’ve worked in a company where the travel department – made up of 20+ people – made each worker get quotes from three different travel agencies and complete a ream of forms which they would then review and possibly approve. When I worked in a smaller company you’d email the travel girl with some basic details and any preferences and she’d do the rest. I also worked in a company where the contracts department made the engineers write the entire contract, after which they’d staple the general terms and conditions to the back of it. I worked in another place where every year my career manager would ask for my CV, which she already had but she wanted it in “the new format”.

People talk about AI robots replacing HR and other admin functions, but from what I can tell that won’t be necessary. If it’s replacing existing brain power, a reprogrammed food processor would suffice.

Via a reader, this is a good blog post which deals with several topics I write about on here, i.e. the degree to which large companies outsource expertise, the bureaucratic burden of compliance, people working in the gig economy, and the role of HR. Some quotes:

Today, Human Resources costs have gone up so much that small companies are outsourcing their HR tasks to service contractors.  If you’re a small company, perhaps around the 50-employee mark, the amount of time required to ensure compliance with the many laws interferes with the other things managers need to do.  As a result, they hire HR service companies to ensure they’re meeting all the regulations.

…

In the case of big engineering/manufacturing companies like the one I’m retired from, they will probably only keep the people who are their technology leaders as full time employees.  There will be fewer new graduate engineers hired: big companies were typically where new grads went for their first job because they’re too expensive for a small company to make productive. Perhaps those companies will soon be a few percent long-term employees, maybe twice that percentage in promising young engineers, but the majority of the “heavy lifting”; the jobs that require experience and the engineering judgement that experience brings, will go to contract engineers.

…

You may have heard this referred to as “the Gig Economy”; you don’t have a full time position anywhere, but you have a handful of part time jobs that you do as needed.

Go and read the whole thing.

A reader sends me this story:

A Google executive has left the company with no severance after he was accused of sexually harassing a young female job applicant by inviting her to Burning Man and asking her to take of her shirt for a massage.

Google parent Alphabet confirmed on Wednesday that Rich DeVaul had left the company as tensions heightened over how they handle such matters of sexual harassment allegations.

…

He was accused of telling a young female hardware engineer during her job interview that he and his wife were ‘polyamorous’.

DeVaul invited the woman to visit the Burning Man festival with him the week after her interview. The woman said she took her mother along because she thought it was an opportunity to speak about the role.

She claims DeVaul asked her to take off her shirt for a back rub when they were at the festival. She refused initially but agreed to a neck rub after DeVaul kept insisting.

Polyamory? Burning Man? Strange, because he doesn’t look the ty…oh, wait:

Of the group of people who inspired my book, which loyal readers will know is in part about a polyamorous community for whom Burning Man was an annual pilgrimage, the men were overwhelmingly working in IT. During my research, the ever-reliable Daniel Ream pointed out that while not every bloke working in IT is a deviant, the sort of people who are into polyamory will gravitate towards IT. The degenerate in the photo above is a walking polyamorous Burning Man stereotype. While I don’t wish to engage in victim-blaming, I find myself asking what sort of woman would go to Burning Man with this guy having been propositioned in an interview, and bring her mother along?

The woman said she took her mother along because she thought it was an opportunity to speak about the role.

Do IT people usually involve their mothers when invited to speak about a professional role? And that her mother was willing to go to Burning Man at all, let alone in those circumstances, says rather a lot about the family.

And this brings me onto my wider point. Regular readers of my blog will hardly be surprised that an ultra-woke polyamorous man with green hair turns out to be a rampant sex-pest. If he hasn’t spent the past decade identifying as a male feminist, I’d be amazed. Yet these are the sort of people Google actively recruits and promotes, based on their adherence to the ever-evolving SJW scripture, while firing anyone who commits heresy. The world’s largest tech company has made a point of hiring people with severe mental issues who parrot the correct political mantra, and has absolutely no idea what to do about the inevitable result. Here, via Tim Almond, is the BBC:

Staff at Google offices around the world have staged an unprecedented series of walkouts in protest at the company’s treatment of women.

The employees are demanding several key changes in how sexual misconduct allegations are dealt with at the firm, including a call to end forced arbitration – a move which would make it possible for victims to sue.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action.

“I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel,” he said in an all-staff email. “I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society… and, yes, here at Google, too.”

Like some medieval religious cult, the self-flagellating priests think the problem is they’ve not flagellated themselves enough. By hand-wringing, pandering to extremists, and recruiting the mentally unstable they’ve fostered an environment where major HR issues are inevitable. But because they’re so far up their own backsides, they can no longer identify the problem, let alone solve it. That’s why they have to pretend this problem of green-haired polyamorous managers taking interviewees and their mothers to Burning Man exists everywhere.

Staff involved in Thursday’s walkout left notes on their desks telling colleagues: “I’m not at my desk because I’m walking out with other Googlers and contractors to protest sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a workplace culture that’s not working for everyone.”

These are not the actions of functioning adults. And besides, the managers are drawn from the ranks of people who are exactly like those walking out. Even if Google fired every manager tomorrow, they’ll be replaced by dysfunctional millennials who will act in exactly the same way. These people were recruited as perfect fits for the corporate culture they are now protesting.

They have also made formal demands to Google’s management. They are:

A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequality

A commitment to end things which by any objective measure don’t exist. Things haven’t got off to a good start, have they?

A publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report

This will read like the product of an algorithm taking stock phrases from The Huffington Post while mixing in a few generic “corporate values” available from any good PR agency.

A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously

This almost certainly exists: the trouble is, Google recruits psychopaths and promotes them as managers, who are then given control over said process.

The elevation of the chief diversity officer to answer directly to the CEO, and make recommendations directly to the board of directors

So diversity will become separated from HR? How’s that going to work? And what’s diversity got to do with sexual harassment?

The appointment of an employee representative to the board

Didn’t these used to be called unions? It’s going to be interesting to see what a unionised workforce thinks of Silicon Valley’s hiring practices.

An end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination for all current and future employees

With forced arbitration being:

Forced arbitration, a common contract clause for Silicon Valley workers, demands any disputes are dealt with internally rather than through other methods such as the courts.

I’d have thought this amounted to a denial of one’s statutory rights, but given it’s California I suppose anything is possible. What is amusing is we had the YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki publicly denouncing James Damore for wrongthink and Google CFO Ruth Porat weeping over the election of Donald Trump, all the while presiding over employment contracts which would look familiar to a 19th century Kentuckian mine worker.

Rather than ratcheting up the self-flagellation to levels not seen outside extremist cults, Google needs to get a grip by firing the bulk of its senior management and replacing them with sensible people who put in place policies which make the firm more like a serious corporation than a playground, thus changing the culture to one in which sane adults flourish while the mentally ill and perpetually aggrieved don’t get through the main gate. Their complete drip of a CEO can start this process by resigning on the spot.