Big Bother

Yesterday a piece in The Guardian highlighted the use of jargon in HR to draw parallels with Orwellian Newspeak — the manipulation of minds through euphemistic phrases like “offboarding,” “streamlining” and “annual leave”.

And here you are, not even knowing that you were a totalitarian Stalinist puppet all along.

Honestly though, we’ve yet to see anything written by HR pros in praise of jargon, though we do hear people use “conflab” around us a great deal. (On second thoughts, those Italians might just be calling us fat.)

Sadly, the article mistakes the language of HR as being HR specific, when in reality HR is complying only with the lingua franca of business. Accusations that HR abuses the passive voice through turns of phrase such as: “company policy is unable to support that,” in order to escape accountability apportions blame unfairly in just the one corner.

Also the author apparently can’t recognise that isn’t the passive voice. But let’s not quibble.

One of the symptoms of the world we live in is that accountability is now the same as liability. Not for nothing are companies now “sorry for” and “sympathise with” hurtful consequences, yet refuse to apologise for them,

An apology implies culpability, and culpability leads to lawsuits.

HR may well be saturated in the language of business, but corporate speak did not spring purely from chance, nor did it originate with HR.

It is obfuscation for (say) investors reports and a way for all kinds of people to gloss over some uncomfortable truths.

The language did not spring up as a means of “low-tech mind control” as the author puts it, but as an inevitably human way of putting a pretty face on some not very pretty things.

If HR wants to help people, it needs to be taken seriously by business. And if it wants to be taken seriously by business, it has to play ball and speak its language.

This isn’t to say HR can’t do better — it can — but you know what they say: when in Rome… you conflab.

P.S Some of the 1000 + comments on the article will do wonders for your self-esteem:

Exactly – HR are the political wing of management. Most of them appear to be dead-eyed psychopaths.

It’s the career for chubby ladies who concern themselves mainly with the exchange of cakes, fussing about co-workers’ birthdays and facebook. They’re the evil of banality incarnate, truly unsettling avatars of all that is most biddable.

It’s the career path for sociopaths if ever there was one.

Proof if there ever was some that you should never use the phrase “I’m my own harshest critic.”

But fear not, not everybody is against HR!

Generally, HR personnel are some of the more selfless individuals among us. Even if they are annoying.

Thanks. We think.

About the author

Jerome Langford

Jerome is a graduate in Philosophy from St Andrews, who alternately spends time writing about HR and staring wistfully out of windows, thinking about life’s bigger questions: Why are we here? How much lunch is too much lunch? What do you mean exactly by ‘final warning’?