If you like human beings, steer clear of Human Resources
ii^ f you've ever been involved in managing people, on however small a scale and to whatever bathyspheric depths of ineptitude, it's a fair bet that you've been sent on a Fair Selection Course. They sent me on one, the BBC's personnel people — that forever growing troop of monkeys we've all been bullied into calling 'Human Resources', as if 'personnel' was insufficiently grandiose for them. Anyway, I went on this benighted course and, as licence-payers' money was spent enabling me to do so, I hope some of it rubbed off.
Certainly, its mixture of the bloody obvious, condescension and crushing boredom left a sort of impression on me — in fact, the impression of a ballpoint pen driven repeatedly into my left wrist as a means of warding off terminal catatonia, Believe me, by the end of the two-day session, the pen was rusty with dried blood.
After the Fair Selection business came the targets, with their multifarious performance indicators. The requirement at that time — 1998 — was to get more black people working in the BBC. Very stupid black people, one began to feel, would do just as well as very clever black people. So long as they were black. Or disabled.
Black and disabled, meanwhile, in Human Resources terms, was equivalent to a double-word score in Scrabble. There were stashes of money from which one could fund the appointment of a black person who, say, couldn't walk, or tie his or her own shoelaces, as a result of some unfortunate mental or physical impairment.
We had to tell our bosses how many black people we were employing. At the Today programme, we were miles over the requisite percentage, although it was never very clear what, exactly, was meant by 'black'. It seemed to mean 'not white— that old and somewhat discredited definition first coined in the 1960s by the hard Left. Black could mean a public-school-educated, uppermiddle-class Indian journalist, for example. My worry was that it almost always did: as far as Fair Selection went, that was just as good as employing, say, a state-educated, working-class African-Caribbean journalist. Their experiences of discrimination — racial, and consequently social and economic — were deemed to be equivalent. Which of course they are most certainly not.
Occasionally, we would artificially boost our totals of 'ethnic minorities'. We didn't need to because, as I say, we were way above our 'quota' — but we were occasionally possessed by the spirit of devilment. One year we included Sue MacGregor as an ethnic minority, for example. Sue was brought up in South Africa. She may not strike you as entirely representative of our ethnic minorities but, as luck would have it, she counted as such on the bone-headed form.
There was a brilliant bloke who had Portuguese-Goan ancestry, too. So he went down on the form, despite being several shades lighter than most of the Caucasians working on the programme. Was he black? Nobody really knew. He was generous enough to allow himself to be described as black for administrative purposes.
In fact, this nonsensical classification of people inspired one of the funniest and sharpest pieces of journalism I can remember from my time on Today. A reporter, Mike Thompson, rang up the BNP membership secretary and clandestinely recorded the man's response to a succession of questions about which races were allowed to join the BNP. The imbecile from the BNP said yes to some, no to others (including our Goan reporter) and hummed and hawed over the rest. Eventually, exasperated, he cried: 'Look, mate, do you want a bloody colour chart?'
Nothing I've heard or read about the BNP so exposed the illogicality, lack of humanity and utter stupidity of its position on race as this mischievous little scam. But I rather hoped that our Human Resources people were listening because, in a way, the joke was on them too.
I don't mean to castigate the BBC in particular for any of this, incidentally. It was behaving no differently from any other large corporation with a sense of social responsibility and decency. It felt it was doing the right thing. It is palpably obvious — to me, at least — that companies should be truly representative of the people whom they serve in terms of race and, although this is not much mentioned these days, class. In the BBC's case it made good commercial sense, too.
But, sadly, Fair Selection and quotas are the currently approved methods of attempting to achieve this. It is an unavoidable symptom of our present penchant for making a fetish out of management structures and procedures, entirely regardless of their efficacy. The same sort of thing can be seen with performance indicators in, for example, the NHS. The problem is this: the means by which one might achieve a desirable end becomes the end itself, to the general detriment of the patients.
Anyway, I was reminded of my travails at the BBC by two recent social surveys which appear, at first, only tangentially related. The first suggested that people who smoke at work found it a useful means of networking with the boss class and were often, subsequently, looked upon favourably. The second report averred that people who drink socially with colleagues, outside work, rise up the promotion ladder more rapidly. I digested these reports a little ruefully, having been a somewhat flawed manager of people at the Today programme. Yep, I thought, that's what happened back then, I'm sure of it.
Quite a few of our journalists were appointed after a few drinks or a furtive cigarette consumed near the delivery yard — by and large, these were people who would not have applied to join the BBC through the more orthodox routes. The formal procedures put them off, for some reason. Sometimes they were people from ethnic minorities. Sometimes they were white. They were nearly always, though, people with an instinctive dis
like of authority which is a good quality in journalists. My own view, actually, is that it's a good quality in human beings, full stop.
We have become very pious and ascetic and censorious of late. Those reports about the career benefits to individuals of socialising, in whatever way, with managers were held by the newspapers and pressure groups to be universally reprehensible. I suppose that it would be going too far to suggest that, actually, it's a more palpably human method of recruiting your human resources than through the stifling rigmarole imposed from the corporate centre. It all depends on whether you wish to have a truly diverse and sociable workforce, or whether you wish, instead, to fulfil your quotas and maybe win one of those bloody Investors in People certificates — an accolade which, for some reason, I was never afforded back when I was allowed to manage people.
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