This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Imagine a post-apocalyptic future where nothing much survives except giant cockroaches and those irritating folk from the HR department. This is the terrifying — yet oddly plausible — world of Fallout, a new TV series.
Fictional futures tend to reflect our present-day anxieties. So, it is perhaps no surprise that the growing influence of human resources across business should now be inspiring dystopian drama.
Over the past few years, there’s been a drumbeat of think tank reports and media articles criticising the burgeoning size of HR teams and blaming them for the excesses of woke capitalism.
Whilst there are merits in these arguments, they miss the bigger picture. Like the humble roach, HR folks are resilient, adaptable and — like it or not — will always be omnipresent.
The steady rise of the function once known as “Payroll” or “Personnel” has always been controversial. In the early 20th century, ambitious wage clerks and health and safety inspectors saw in the emerging academic disciplines of psychology and anthropology an opportunity to move up the food chain.
Yet the development of time and motion studies, and even the phrase “human resources”, immediately raised the hackles of those who feared individual people were being treated as nameless economic inputs.
More prosaically, HR has also acquired an unfortunate reputation for being the corporate incarnation of the Stasi. More than once in my career, I found innocent gossip with the departmental HR officer coming back to bite me after my indiscretions were passed on to top management.
Britain has 60 per cent more HR staff than the USA, costing the economy £10 billion
Yet, it has been the more recent rise of diversity, equity and inclusion, wellness initiatives and other corporate wokery that has really put HR in the spotlight. A recent Policy Exchange report pointed out that, pro rata, Britain has 60 per cent more people employed in HR than the United States: “a misallocation of labour that is costing the economy £10 billion”.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Birmingham University’s Professor Stan Siebert said: “The HR department is just a parasite. It’s an extra obstacle to the business owner trying to be entrepreneurial and earn a crust.”
Even the New Statesman has stuck the boot in with a feature provocatively headlined “How human resources captured the nation”.
But here’s the thing. In the businesses I know, the excesses associated with DEI have passed their high-water mark and are perhaps in rapid retreat.
Some readers may remember my own experience with compulsory “allyship” training a couple of years ago (see The Critic July 2024). Well, the promised follow-up session has still not been scheduled. And I haven’t spotted the colourfully-dressed head of diversity in the office for months.
Since the re-election of Donald Trump, my sense is that business leaders have quietly stalled DEI activities and de-prioritised targets for gender and ethnicity quotas. Whilst the public sector may still be trapped in the Kafkaesque world of micro-aggressions and intersectionality, companies are discreetly moving on.
However, amidst this shifting tide, chief human resources officers are bestriding the C-Suites more imperiously than ever.
By and large, they remain the unchallenged consiglieri to the CEO. The comms people were influential for a while, but the demise of the traditional financial press means leaders no longer much care what reporters think of them. General counsels are all-powerful in the States, but, over here, they are often fusspots with little commercial acumen.
Meanwhile, the HR director’s close study of human psychology and network of spies make him or her ideally positioned to be the chief boss whisperer.
Furthermore, contrary to the popular image portrayed in shows like The Apprentice, CEOs generally are people-pleasers who hate awkward, confrontational conversations — and they are happy to delegate these to HR.
Now, as businesses everywhere begin a gigantic replumbing exercise, outsourcing countless white-collar roles and replacing others with AI, HR chiefs are reinventing themselves yet again.
Make no mistake, the biggest changes to business structures in decades are well under way. Publicly we all talk about exciting growth opportunities from harnessing new technologies.
But the reality is that in this era of impending stagflation, companies are having to take urgent and radical approaches to slicing through costs. As always, it’s human resources who are donning the butcher’s apron.
So, if you ever find yourself emerging from a bomb shelter following a catastrophic nuclear exchange, don’t be too surprised if the first person you meet greets you with the words: “I’m from HR, and I am here to help.”
