GUEST POST

Robert Laverick is a chemist and senior lecturer, and founder of the Leeds branch of Academics for Academic Freedom. He tweets from @RobLaverick92

Having studied and worked within the higher education sector since 2010,  I’ve watched ideas develop in the academy before escaping into the wider world, including the corporate workplace. Often these are very considered developments with a clear purpose such as flexible working or environmental responsibility. Sometimes, unintended and harmful consequences develop from well-intentioned beginnings, which can then be nurtured for personal or ideological gain.

It’s easy to rationalise why highly intellectualised ideas propagate through the academy. One of the primary benefits of the sector is to give space to intelligent people to think about things within a narrow remit and develop theories – others can then take those thoughts and do something useful with them. That’s the theory. In reality, ideas relating to workplace culture often sneak their way into the corporate sphere via unusual routes, evading the usual processes of good governance.

For the most part, ideas that benefit the organisational culture or financial prosperity of businesses are directly brought in from the musing of academics and others by senior leaders across the private sector. This often takes the form of collaborations between universities and businesses, spinout companies taking key ideas into the wider sector, and training sessions provided to business leaders with academic roots – even when presented by corporate training away days or charities etc. All makes sense so far – a happy workforce and profitable business are the drive of all entrepreneurs!

However, the demand to “be kind” and the seeming need for businesses to protect employees from all of the world’s apparent ills doesn’t immediately fit the orthodox model of corporate value creation, yet business have, over the course of the last decade or so, rewritten many of their policies and changed their entire culture to embrace these new aims.

Across higher education, it’s easy to see that the needs of students are different to the needs of experienced professionals and students pay for their studies, so the expected levels of support have increased across the higher education sector. Understandably (even if misguidedly) HEIs have moulded around those changing demands.

Graduates leaving university and entering the workplace take these expectations with them; they forget that they no longer control the purse strings. However, businesses within the corporate world must compete to hire top talent. Graduates were quick to recognise this shift in the balance of power. In a seller’s market, those with in-demand skills naturally take their expectations up a notch. They sought workplaces that mirrored the coddling they experienced at university. Career development and higher salaries were no longer the language of graduates. Corporate virtue signalling and safe spaces became the pillow talk to woo them.

At a recent LGB Alliance Business Forum event in Holyrood hosted by Tess White MSP, I spoke about how the upcoming generation of students are beginning to reject this now old fad. In my and my colleagues’ experience, students are increasingly voicing their opposition to the restriction and suppression of their free speech and policies they see as suffocating. We can see in the recent Compelled Conformity report that these future graduates will have plenty of support from their LGB colleagues with these aspirations. The challenge is awakening that support.

In the LGB Alliance Business Forum’s report, 86% of respondents said they avoided expressing views about sex, gender or sexual orientation at work because they feared consequences, 65% reported feeling pressure to publicly affirm views they did not personally hold, and 35% reported experiences such as social exclusion or hostility from colleagues or managers. Clearly “be kind” isn’t working for many.

Wright and McMahon (1992) define strategic human resource management as, “The pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable an organisation to reach its goals”, but could a strategic management strategy be led by unknowing or ideologically driven actors?

Many junior and middle managers have latched onto EDI expectations from graduates and their own political interests to get noticed and progress their career. Why bother being good at your job when you can signal virtue to progress faster? Once in more senior roles they have been able to control narratives in the workplace and build networks advancing these ideas.

Tackling this new pink- haired version of the old boys’ club requires a coalition of groups with skin in the game, and most importantly, courage.

Remember that courage calls to courage and it may be the earnest and instinctive actions of new students and future graduates speaking against the ingrained orthodoxies across the business world, perceived as courage by older colleagues feeling repressed by company policies, which draws out their own courage.

Reference: 
 Wright, P.M. and McMahan, G.C. (1992), ‘Theoretical perspectives for SHRM’, Journal of Management, 8(2), pp.295-320