Matthew Taylor in conversation with... Strategic HR
Recently the government passed a
measure that I’d pressed for in my
review. The threshold for workers to
have the right to representation at work
was 10% and I said it should be 2%…
Because the challenge is you can’t just
rely on management being benign.
Management will be benign most of
the time, but often firms have really
ambitious strategies around
engagement and then when things
go wrong that’s one of the first things
to go.
AP: I completely agree. We have
something called Speak Up, which is a
channel that goes to our parent
company first. I think it’s an essential
part of good business that people
have the chance to raise problems.
Because you’ll always get a bad egg, a
bad manager.
MT: I wanted to talk about technology.
We do a lot of work on that here… We
want to say ‘the future is not
determined by technology, it’s
determined by us…’ I think a lot of the
conversation feels quite pessimistic. My
grandfather was an engineer at Dunlop
and I remember his excitement when
the first television arrived in Crosby.
For him that was the first step that
would lead inexorably to colonies on
Mars. And I contrast his excitement
with what people feel now, which is
that very large corporations and
incredible power and knowledge will
make enormous profits, and we the
public will be the powerless agents.
How do we change the conversation?
AP: I think we’ve started to see a
sea-change with people holding
organisations like Facebook to account.
And that’s positive. We’re working with
the NSPCC to keep kids safe online...
MT: More generally, these are difficult
times we’re living in – of polarisation,
of anger – you spend a lot of time
talking to all sorts of people up and
down the country. When Brexit
happened were you surprised?
AP: I was hugely surprised… The
night of the referendum I was at a
dinner sitting next to a hugely wellrespected
fund manager. She said ‘we’ll
be fine, we’ll stay’ but she said she voted
to come out because ‘the government
needs to be taught a lesson’. I met a
number of very senior, highly
intelligent, responsible people at this
charity thing who said the same thing,
and that blew my mind. That
frightened me. But there were also an
awful lot of people who felt left behind.
We’ve let those people down badly.
MT: So who’s responsible? Is it
business? Is it government?
AP: The world is never going to be the
way we all want it. But I don’t think
government has done a great job over
the past few years of making everyone
feel valued. I don’t feel proud when I go
over to Spain.
MT: We do a lot at The RSA on
inclusive growth. There’s a sense that
the urban renaissance was great for the
people who lived in town centres but it
wasn’t so good in the peripheral estates.
AP: Have we cracked it? No. But those
places are definitely better now. I went
to a school in the West Midlands a
couple of weeks ago and the
headteacher said ‘this might be a bit of
a tough gig’. But they were some of the
most engaged, interesting, challenging
kids. Conversely I went to a school in a
very nice borough of London and they
were all looking out of the window.
MT: Is it the same at O2? Is a young
working-class person easy to manage,
but it’s the people from Russell Group
universities that are trickier?
AP: I would say as a white workingclass
woman I’ve been quite tricky to
manage all the way through my career!
MT: Ha fair enough… Do you think
HR is challenging enough within
companies that aren’t behaving
terribly well?
AP: So you’ve got effective HR people
and those who aren’t effective. In the
same way you have with CEOs and
FDs… If you’re working at an
organisation that’s commercial, has
really small margins, you can see how
people got to zero-hours contracts.
People can convince themselves that’s
flexibility, that students will love it. It’s
having that confidence to pause and say
‘hang on a minute is this the right thing
to do?’ It shouldn’t just be HR people
who do that by the way.
MT: One of the issues we’ve had is
people haven’t rung the alarm bells… It
seems we need HR to say to the board
‘it is my professional duty to tell you,
beyond the law, that isn’t acceptable’.
AP: I completely agree. It is relatively
recent – the past 10 years – that HR has
had an equal voice at the table. There
are many times I’ve had stern words
behind closed doors with a chief exec to
say ‘what the fuck are you doing?’
That’s my job.
MT: But you can do that because
you’re you; it’s hard if you’re in your
early thirties and just climbing up…
AP: But part of my job is to be a
bit of a role model to show that’s
possible. There’s a whole load of other
feisty HR people out there who are
great role models, like Valerie Hughes-
D’Aeth at the BBC. She’s doing an
amazing job… Most of the
organisations I’ve worked in I’ve been
involved in every decision before
they’re made. That’s partly luck and
partly because I’m a gobby Scouser. HR
For a short
period
I was
the only
woman on
the board.
That’s
when the
penny
really
dropped
that I
was the
different
person in
the room
hrmagazine.co.uk June 2019 HR 35
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