Has Politics become HR which nobody believes is much more than bullshit?

A couple of weeks ago, a mate with whom I once worked and now works for the BBC beamed me a copy of a letter he had sent to the new BBC chief, Matt Brittin, who took up his role in the past week.

Dear Mr Brittin,

Welcome to the BBC, and please forgive me writing to you anonymously. The reason I am doing so will be fairly obvious to you when you read this.

So, here we are in May, and once again, as every year, we are required to go through the pantomime that is our HR department’s great exercise in collective mass time-wasting, known as My Conversation.

As you are probably still unfamiliar with this, I shall explain in brief; we are all required to write a self-justification for our continued employment at the BBC, embellished with such wonderful HR jargon as “job accountabilities”, “reflections”, “smart goals” etc.

This all has to be done on Gateway, in a set format. Navigating your way around this could be likened to doing that famous roundabout in Swindon while wearing a motorbike helmet and dark glasses – every year, I come back and don’t know where to start, or when I am supposed to be finished. I am no slouch intellectually, having flown aircraft and speaking a foreign language, but I really struggle with working this stuff out. Why does it have to be SO complex?

Our new HR supremo, Mr Uzair Qadeer, clearly found this level of buggering about to be far too low, as he came up with more nonsense this year – in his email of 7 April he proudly informed us all that there were two updates – an “employee skills question”, and “expanded career goals”. (I often wonder what his own will be.)

My experience of working for the BBC – almost 15 years now – is this. I do my job, and try very hard to do it well, and I’m generally told by my supervisor that I do the job pretty competently. He might occasionally ask me to do something a little different, or point out the odd mistake (as he should do, of course). I listen to his comments and follow his instructions.

I can honestly say I don’t have any real “career goals”. I can’t go into detail here as I don’t want to identify myself, but there is really nowhere to go in my particular department in terms of career growth. I am perfectly content with that situation – I am not a youngster, and am not particularly ambitious, I just enjoy what I do and want to crack on with it every day to the best of my ability.

I can fairly safely say that everyone, bar none, with whom I have discussed this issue is in complete agreement with me. Everyone finds this to be a monstrous waste of time, that could simply be achieved with a quick chat with the boss and none of this attendant HR-jargon laden rubbish.

As someone with considerable experience in both journalism and HR, I beamed the missive, without identifying details, to a range of journalism, HR and bureaucratic contacts, both current and retired, in the Commonwealth, Victorian and NSW public sectors, the ABC, the university sector, some large local governments, and two major banks.

My experience of having done that is a very large number of replies.

Plenty of people related their experiences with the names of their performance management systems, forms, and databases, many of which had a bewildering array of acronyms and processes ranging from the ‘Back on Track’ to ‘RightPath’ or ‘Pathway to Change’ to ‘Alignment Focus’ – described to me as ‘a reverse Voigt-Kampf test to make sure nobody was too human’.

Every last one of which was in complete agreement with the sentiments. Every last one referred to the waste of time, the jargon, and the repeated pitches for something outside the workplace, rather than the meaningful issues within it. A disturbingly large number of them referred to the people who would have access to whatever was gleaned from those systems – their own managements and the HR outfits of their organisations. Nobody expressed any upside to this sort of process.

One mate, now retired but recently a senior executive in the Victorian Public Service, who has expressed the view to me that very large numbers of the people with whom he used to interact were ‘on the spectrum’ for lack of empathy, manipulative behaviours, and narcissism, if not outright psychopathy, chimed back with another take on the issue.

Depressingly, he broadened the implications from the organisation to wider society by flipping a read from the New York Times this week, Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R. by Amanda Taub

The article addresses how right-wing regimes and dictatorships retain loyalty and get people to do dirty jobs, but the implication was that run-of-the-mill bureaucracies in perfectly civilised nations like ours have a touch of those about them too.

The line of thinking builds up from,

It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

And

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

And builds up to,

Although each country has its own idiosyncrasies, that process tends to follow a pattern, said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies democratic backsliding. Initially, elected would-be autocrats often appoint “loyal losers” to important positions to rubber-stamp their power grabs, Ms. Frantz said. “The leader knows that people are going to be more likely to be loyal if they don’t have many other career options, so when I say losers, I kind of mean it literally,” she said.

From there, if we bring that back to Australia for a moment, we can observe that our bureaucracies and larger corporates have a history over the last generation of being more ‘go with the flow’ of whatever the chiefs or the politicians exhorted and less ‘frank and fearless advice’ in support of something as obscure as ‘the public interest’.

Think Robodebt. Think large companies blowing up sacred Aboriginal sites. Think public discussion of immigration, or student numbers, or even Free Trade Agreements. From there, step across to thoughts about gas exports and electricity costs or the risks of Neo Nazis or anti Semitism.

The silence around all these suggests someone makes the call and a chorus of ‘team players’ with some form of vested interest joins in. Sometimes that call is for action – see Neo Nazis and Anti Semitism – and sometimes that call is ‘nothing to see here’ (or you are racist, a sovereign risk, a luddite or ‘Un-Australian’ if you keep raising this subject).

Now at that point one can observe that every large organisation in Australia will have policy exhorting ‘Integrity’ which is generally the purview of HR types who ensure some form of compliance when issues arise. Those same HR types often have similar purview over pushing Diversity, Respect, Training, Recruitment – and lots of ideology – which brings about the question of whether the ideology reflects:

• the workplace imperatives
• blind ideology
• the ‘public interest’ for public employees, or
• the interests of their bosses

As well as the ‘Integrity’ of the Integrity policies and the Integrity compliance processes. Are our interests aligned with those workplaces as well as those bosses. And if there are questions, what will those HR types support when called to decide between them?

To round all that out we come to the fact that our politicians call the shots on a very large sector of the economy, in a nation which contains some of the most expensive people, land, and energy on the planet. And that those last points make our country about the last one a profit maker would seek to be in unless being on the right side of those making the calls.

And from there it is an easy step to ask if the questions about the integrity of our elites are the genesis of the disenchantment with our political processes and parties.