Ordinarily not predisposed to heaping upon praise on tech bros, I can’t help but think one of them has just revealed how to save the future of work. At a recent Fortune event, Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow remarked that he’d just axed his entire human resources (HR) division.
Bolt, not to be confused with the Uber rival, is a checkout payment tech, founded by Breslow in 2014. Like many startups of its generation, Bolt has known inflated highs, then sobering lows – in 2022 it was valued at $11b, now it’s around $300m. Things just haven’t been the same since those awful months in early 2023 when Silicon Valley Bank finally choked on all that sour ESG it had been chugging.
It’s not clear when exactly the current form of HR made landfall, but I counselled an English friend back in April of 2019. One unsuspecting Monday he arrived at his financial services firm to discover a newly minted desk called “Culture” headed by a “Chief People Officer”, an enormous woman called Terri who moved her head in an odd way. A circular informed staff that this new department would absorb recruitment, something that had previously functioned unseen.
At first I was sympathetic – to Terri. Being English-finance, my friend was allergic to initiative and unable to generate more than two good ideas annually. Or work past Friday 11am when he’d take clients out for lunch and not return to the office.
His firm was established but its shareholders wanted more. As happens with these things, some external brainiac would have been consulted, and this party, possibly a slender vegan, would have concluded that injecting a landwhale into the firm’s veins would trigger a cash tsunami.
Thereafter he was miserable. He and his colleagues found themselves under intensified surveillance, the earliest indicator of a cull. Cynically this happened just after summer holidays, its blade missing my friend by millimetres. Then came the fads announced by group mail – things most staffers didn’t know existed – non-binary people’s day, earth hour, trans visibility and black history month (October). The company was used to an occasional quote in the finance section of broadsheets; now, Terri was appearing in recruitment enterprise media, pictured standing cross armed, next to the firm’s entrance. All twelve acres of her.
“Culture” was upsized
In contrast to the company’s other desks, “Culture” was upsized. New, smaller Terris were added to payroll – “muffin couriers”. My friend had secured permission to commandeer a boardroom one Saturday morning for colleagues to watch England play South Africa in the final of the Rugby World Cup, but “Culture” nixed it the day before. As
despondent staffers returned to work following their national team’s trouncing, a passive-aggressive email from Terri explained that a well-known broadcaster was coming to the office to discuss her new book, and attendance was “encouraged”. On the loo my friend turned off Wi-Fi to research the writer. There, he discovered she might not like white people that much.
These, coupled with the chilling cull and the hint of another did not make the company more profitable or happier. But it did shift the balance of power. By November, even some executives were worried.
The second redundancy wave crashed the week before Christmas. My friend was almost relieved when told to report to the hamplanet’s corner office. “May I just say,” Terri whispered without expression, “I am particularly sorry to have to tell you this.” “Are you?” he asked quietly, perhaps responding to an urge in all of us that delights in the sight of eyeballs rolling around sockets, the patheticness of humans and power.
Experiences like these are why the UK, particularly in the last week, has come to describe the country’s police force as a modern HR exercise in drag. While elitists try to diminish or deny the capital’s skyrocketing crime statistics, the cops police everything – but crime. Increasingly popular opinion states that the way to their attention is to claim that someone stealing your fridge has left you mentally fragile – and while this is unlikely to result in a prosecution, they may check in on your sadness levels, in the same way modern HR will check on your enthusiasm for abortion. Nice of them.
Vintage gangster extortion
Explaining his actions, Breslow claimed Bolt HR was “making problems that previously weren’t there”. I take that to mean that they were justifying their existence by creating the very issues they were supposed to address – and that’s some vintage gangster extortion right there, up with the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Centre or the South African state and its “genocide” rumour-milling. Recently Connie Mulder has broken cover to suggest that the gossip that Pieter Groenewald is angling for the Presidency is another one of these menacing ploys. I suspect Connie may be right.
Prohibitive forces are already well entrenched against today’s young seeking to enter work. The first is your internet recruitment agencies, who do nothing but sit on CVs until they reach a volume attractive enough to flog to some boiler room operating out of Manila. If one manages to find itself in possession of an HR human but doesn’t contain sufficient excitement about social justice, then, sorry. HR’s modern powers also include the final call as to “underrepresentation” in firms – this, before tax implications, which is before actual work, which is before keeping schtum about the degree to which you feel the state should influence your life. That kind of talk is the last thing you want a substantial woman with multiple framed diversity certificates to be hearing.
The days of firms treating money as gentleman’s expulsion have vanished. Now things have gone all Sylvia Plath on us, the fixture of HR and its unwarranted prominence must be resisted – crusaded against even. Culture at work is just work, and it’s up to everyone to follow Breslow’s example and gang up on HR in a way that has previously been done to people who ride bicycles.
[Image: Elham Abdi on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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