HR Would Like A Word

When culture is defined, HR can help people do their best work.
When it isn’t, you can end up with policies nobody asked for and training nobody believes in.

But first, today’s highlights:

💻 Leeds Digital Festival kicked off on Monday 22nd - spaces are tight on many of the sessions but there may be the odd spot left!

🤷‍♂️ Nscale has partnered with Microsoft and OpenAI to provide the Data centre infrastructure a huge investment boost for UK AI.

There are now more HR professionals in Britain than doctors or lawyers.

That was the startling line in the Sunday Times magazine last weekend, in a piece about how the Human Resources department has “taken over” British business.

The tone was predictably grim: HR portrayed as a meddling force of endless training courses, tribunals, and wasted time.

The implication was clear. HR is less about making businesses work, and more about enforcing an ideology.

It’s a neat narrative. A few horror stories, a jab at “woke” training courses, and the sense that HR is both bloated and indulgent.

But it does beg a question: if HR is such dead weight, why has it become so common?

HR in Startups: Founders Do It All

In the earliest days of a startup, HR isn’t a department at all.

It’s the founder. You set the holiday policy, draft the offer letter (or at least ChatGPT does), and try to keep the peace when tempers flare.

You don’t have the luxury of a professional HR team. And that’s no bad thing. It forces you to think deliberately about what sort of workplace you’re building, rather than outsourcing the question to someone else.

Growing Pains: HR as Handbrake or Accelerator

As companies grow, responsibility has to sit somewhere.

Enter HR.

And this is where opinion splits. For many founders and managing directors, HR feels like a handbrake, slowing down hiring, piling on forms, and mandating courses no one asked for.

It’s the fear that speed and creativity will be traded for compliance and process. The Sunday Times piece spoke to this instinct, and many will have nodded along.

Yet there is another side.

If you’ve consciously built your culture early on, HR can help you codify and amplify it. Not create culture, but give it structure.

Their job isn’t to turn the office into a wellness retreat, nor to cater to every individual preference.It’s to make sure the environment enables people to do their best work.

After all, if you’ve spent the time to hire, train, and resource people, why hobble them with bureaucracy or ambiguity?

Why Codifying Culture Matters

This is where HR, done well, is an amplifier. The right policies reinforce the identity of the business. They make it easier for the right people to thrive, and they repel the wrong people.

You don’t want to attract everyone. You want to attract the people who fit your way of doing things.

That is why the strongest cultures act as a calling card. Outsiders see what you stand for and either lean in or quietly walk away.

The mistake, is leaving culture undefined.

In that vacuum, a new HR team has no choice but to interpret. That’s when you end up with generic training, copy-paste policies, and a department trying to invent meaning on your behalf.

HR as Culture Infrastructure

So perhaps the real question isn’t whether HR has “taken over” British business, but whether businesses have abdicated their responsibility to define what they stand for.

HR at its best is plumbing: unnoticed, reliable, enabling everything else to work.

HR at its worst is a leaky tap, making noise but delivering nothing.

The difference isn’t the department itself. It’s the foundation it has to work with.

See you same time next week.

Carl.

P.S. You can take a look at how we think about culture 👉 here