There was a time when organisations employed people.
They were called staff.
Some were good. Some were useless. Some knew where the stopcock was, which made them effectively immortal.
Then somebody went on a management course and discovered the phrase Human Resource Capital.
This was an important breakthrough because it allowed public bodies to stop thinking of employees as troublesome mammals requiring desks, wages and occasional dignity, and instead regard them as a kind of depreciating spreadsheet livestock.
A person could now be transformed into an FTE.
An FTE could become a resource.
A resource could be aligned.
An aligned resource could be strategically deployed.
And a strategically deployed resource could, with sufficient consultancy support, be made redundant without anybody having to say, “We have sacked Janet.”
Janet had ceased to exist several PowerPoints earlier.
She was now 0.8 headcount variance against target operating model.
This is progress.
Modern public-sector HR exists at the exciting intersection of pastoral care, employment law and low-grade psychological warfare.
Its great achievement is to take almost any recognisable human activity and wrap it in enough process that nobody can remember why they started.
Consider recruitment.
In primitive organisations, a manager might once have said:
“We need someone who can fix boilers.”
This was dangerously informal.
Today the requirement passes through workforce planning, role evaluation, grading, equality review, finance approval, establishment control, vacancy authorisation and something called the People Business Partnering Function, which sounds less like a department than an escort agency for accountants.
Eventually a job description appears.
It is seventeen pages long.
The boiler is not mentioned.
Instead the successful candidate must demonstrate:
- strategic stakeholder engagement;
- collaborative behavioural leadership;
- resilience in ambiguous environments;
- digital confidence;
- values-led decision making;
- evidence of continuous personal development;
- and the ability to lift twenty-five kilograms.
Only the last item has anything to do with the boiler.
The applicant then completes an online form demanding the exact month they left a Saturday job in 1987.
A CV is uploaded.
The system asks them to type the CV out again.
This is not a bug.
It is the first assessment.
Those who survive are invited to interview, where a panel of four people asks identical competency questions while one member furiously types everything into a laptop without making eye contact.
“Tell us about a time you influenced a difficult stakeholder.”
“I once persuaded a naked man with a hammer to leave a library.”
“Can you describe the governance framework you used?”
“No.”
“Thank you. We’ll move on.”
The candidate loses marks.
Eventually HR appoints someone with excellent stakeholder management experience who has never seen a boiler.
They leave after nine months to become Head of Transformation.
This creates another vacancy.
Thus the organism reproduces.
Performance management is equally sophisticated.
Managers are encouraged to hold regular meaningful conversations with staff, provided these conversations are recorded in the approved system, aligned to corporate values, mapped against annual objectives, cross-referenced to development goals and completed before the portal locks on 31 March.
A meaningful conversation therefore runs as follows:
“How are you?”
“Exhausted.”
“Would you say exhausted is Amber or Red?”
“Dead inside.”
“I’ll put Amber.”
Every employee receives objectives.
Objectives should be SMART.
Specific.
Measurable.
Achievable.
Relevant.
Time-bound.
In practice this means:
Objective 1: Continue doing job.
Measure: Job continues.
Target date: March.
Status: Green.
Managers then spend April explaining why everybody achieved ninety-seven per cent of their objectives but nobody can afford to buy printer paper.
Training is another triumph.
The modern public servant is required to complete enough compulsory online learning to qualify as a moderately competent airline pilot.
Cybersecurity.
Data protection.
Fraud awareness.
Information governance.
Safeguarding.
Manual handling.
Equality.
Diversity.
Inclusion.
Anti-bribery.
Counter-fraud.
Counter-terrorism.
Fire safety.
Display screen equipment.
Records retention.
Modern slavery.
Conflicts of interest.
Speaking up.
Whistleblowing.
Mental wellbeing.
Respect at work.
Unconscious bias.
Conscious bias.
Bias about having biases.
And a forty-seven-minute module explaining why forty-seven-minute modules are necessary.
These courses invariably contain a smiling fictional employee called Priya or Ben.
Priya receives an email asking for payroll information.
Should Priya:
A. Send the entire payroll database to Belarus.
B. Publish it on Facebook.
C. Ask her neighbour.
D. Report the suspicious email.
You select D.
Correct!
The organisation now considers you cyber-secure.
Somewhere in Minsk, a ransomware crew wipes away tears of frustration.
Perhaps the grandest invention of Human Resource Capital is the employee engagement survey.
This allows senior leadership to discover annually that staff want:
more people,
better pay,
less bureaucracy,
functional IT,
competent management,
and somebody to fix the fucking heating.
Leadership then commissions a consultancy to understand the findings.
Three months later the consultancy delivers a slide deck.
The slide deck reveals five strategic themes:
Belonging.
Purpose.
Voice.
Growth.
Connection.
The heating remains broken.
A taskforce is established.
The taskforce creates a working group.
The working group creates a listening exercise.
The listening exercise discovers that staff still want the heating fixed.
This finding is escalated to Estates.
Estates explains that heating falls under the Integrated Workplace Experience Contract.
Nobody knows who owns that.
Six months later an email arrives announcing Warmth Week, celebrating employee wellbeing.
Staff are encouraged to wear colourful jumpers.
Public-sector organisations are also passionately committed to wellbeing.
This is why a nurse working twelve hours short-staffed may receive an email entitled:
REMEMBER TO PRIORITISE YOU
It contains a picture of pebbles.
The email suggests breathing exercises.
No additional nurse is provided.
Elsewhere, a social worker with forty-three active cases is invited to a lunchtime webinar on resilience.
Attendance is voluntary.
The webinar is during lunch.
The social worker has no lunch.
HR records low engagement with the resilience initiative.
A lessons-learned review follows.
The modern employee must also maintain psychological safety.
This is important.
Psychological safety means staff should feel able to raise concerns without fear of retaliation.
To demonstrate commitment to this principle, many organisations have created elaborate speaking-up frameworks.
These provide at least nine approved channels through which concerns may be raised.
All nine ultimately forward the email to the manager you were complaining about.
Grievance procedures provide further reassurance.
The complainant submits forty pages.
HR acknowledges receipt.
Three weeks later HR asks whether the issue could be resolved informally.
The complainant explains that twelve months of attempted informal resolution are the reason for the grievance.
HR proposes mediation.
The complainant declines.
HR asks whether they have considered mediation.
Eventually an investigating officer is appointed from another department.
This person has never met anyone involved and knows nothing about the subject.
This is regarded as impartiality.
They interview seventeen witnesses and produce a report containing the immortal phrase:
“There are differing perceptions of events.”
One party says, “He threatened me with a chair.”
The other says, “I did not.”
Differing perceptions.
Case closed.
Then there is workforce transformation.
Transformation is what happens when an organisation has exhausted restructuring.
Traditional restructuring moved boxes around an organisation chart.
Transformation removes the organisation chart, hires consultants to invent a new one, and then returns everybody to approximately the same boxes under exciting new names.
Personnel became Human Resources.
Human Resources became People Services.
People Services became People and Culture.
People and Culture became Workforce Experience.
Workforce Experience will eventually become Human Resources again when everybody involved has retired.
The people doing actual work remain largely unchanged.
Dave still fixes lifts.
Dave has survived six operating models.
According to current HR systems, however, Dave is a Technical Infrastructure Experience Partner.
Dave does not know this.
Dave has a screwdriver.
Everyone is frightened of Dave because if Dave leaves, three buildings stop functioning.
This makes Dave the closest thing the public sector has to a warlord.
Senior leaders talk constantly about talent.
There are talent pipelines.
Talent pools.
Talent frameworks.
Talent academies.
Talent reviews.
Nine-box grids divide employees according to performance and potential.
Somewhere, a director places coloured dots against people’s names and decides who has “high potential.”
Nobody puts Dave on the grid.
Dave fixes the grid’s projector.
Succession planning is similarly elegant.
The organisation identifies critical roles.
A spreadsheet is produced.
The spreadsheet reveals that the only person who understands the payroll interface is Maureen, aged sixty-four.
This is classified as a single point of dependency.
Management responds by asking Maureen to document everything.
Maureen says she has been trying to train a deputy since 2012.
The deputy post was removed during transformation.
This is recorded as a learning point.
Maureen retires.
Payroll stops.
An emergency consultancy contract is issued for £900,000.
Maureen returns three days a week as a contractor.
Everyone congratulates themselves on business continuity.
Pay deserves special recognition.
Public bodies often operate transparent salary structures based on grades.
This ensures fairness.
Thus an employee may have responsibility for thirty staff, a seven-figure budget and a statutory service while earning approximately four pounds more than someone who schedules meetings for a director.
The director, meanwhile, cannot increase either salary because of pay governance.
He can, however, appoint an interim consultant at £1,200 per day.
The consultant recommends reviewing pay governance.
The report costs £140,000.
It concludes that remuneration should be competitive.
Everybody agrees.
Nothing changes.
At the bottom of all this sits the line manager.
The line manager is expected to manage performance, absence, wellbeing, development, inclusion, conduct, capability, recruitment, retention, engagement, health and safety, training compliance and team culture while also performing the job for which they were originally employed.
They receive two days of management training.
Day One covers difficult conversations.
Day Two covers how to enter difficult conversations into the HR system.
Afterward they are considered ready.
One must nevertheless admire the sheer reproductive vitality of the Human Resource Capital ecosystem.
Every administrative burden creates a need for another administrator.
Every framework produces a reporting requirement.
Every report identifies a governance gap.
Every governance gap requires assurance.
Every assurance process generates training.
Every training package creates non-compliance.
Every instance of non-compliance requires management action.
And every management action creates another record.
It is the bureaucratic equivalent of rabbits shagging inside a photocopier.
Eventually nobody can find the rabbits.
But there is plenty of paper.
The tragedy is that most of the people inside the machine are perfectly sensible.
HR officers know when a policy is ridiculous.
Managers know when a process wastes time.
Employees know which training is bollocks.
Executives know that the engagement survey will say the same thing as last year.
Everyone knows.
But each individual is attached to only one small lever.
Nobody controls the whole contraption.
And so it grinds onward, producing dashboards, strategies, consultations, competencies, frameworks, toolkits and glossy PDFs showing diverse groups of people pointing enthusiastically at Post-it notes.
Somewhere beneath it all, actual public services continue to function.
Bins are collected.
Children are protected.
Patients are treated.
Benefits are processed.
Roads are repaired.
Libraries open.
Emergencies are answered.
Not because Human Resource Capital has perfectly optimised workforce capability.
But because an enormous number of stubborn, experienced people come to work every morning and quietly do the necessary thing despite the organisation repeatedly getting in their way.
They know which form to ignore.
Which policy is obsolete.
Which printer works.
Which manager will actually make a decision.
Which cupboard contains the emergency biscuits.
And, critically, who knows where the stopcock is.
Human Resource Capital may call these people strategic workforce assets.
Everybody else calls them:
“Thank Christ you’re in today.”