Hester’s comments fester

Quite rightly, the UK is currently going through some uncomfortable soul searching after the The Guardian reported on the racist remarks of Tory party donor Frank Hester about MP Diane Abbott. However, boardrooms should not be counting themselves bastions of equality, according to journalist and chair of Green Park Executive Recruitment, Sir Trevor Phillips.

In an editorial for The Times, he writes: “There’s nothing particularly unusual about Hester’s casual racism. From a review of my own inbox, such remarks are commonplace in our country. Any person of colour in corporate Britain who professes themselves astonished by Hester’s remarks has either lived an unfeasibly sheltered life or is simply lying in order to get on TV.”

Just last week, the Parker Review warned that FTSE 250 companies should “review” their approach to appointing ethnic minority members to boards — 80 FTSE 350 boards remain all white. Meanwhile, Green Park’s own recent research warns women and people from ethnic minority groups are failing to make major inroads into the pipeline jobs that provide gateways to board roles.

Phillips concludes, grimly: “There will always be Frank Hesters. But the likelihood that there will be a person of colour in the room with the confidence to tell the boss that he is an idiot and a bigot remains vanishingly small.

“And it seem our white colleagues are content to shrug their shoulders and allow the stench of prejudice to settle in their nostrils.”

Events around Hester and these research findings tell us that in corporate Britain, all is not well. Time to sort it out, people. “Shoulder shrugging” should be well and truly off the boardroom agenda.

An unfamiliar rift

Companies and investors are becoming “overwhelmed” by a wave of projects requiring them to address “complex societal and environmental issues,” according to “uncomfortable truths” drawn from a six-month project to bring boards and investors closer together.

Three more observations were made as part of the Investor Forum getting together with company leaders: company reporting is “crowding out critical dialogues”; only the biggest companies can afford the “disclosure challenge”; and votes against a board, come AGM time, are not necessarily “effective stewardship”.

The 100-page report covers a host of issues as part of a healing process to a time when investors and boards came to see themselves in conflict. Let’s hope they sort things out.

Platforms are back in

So it seems a lot of the talk on governance over in the US is taking place among millennials and Gen Z, according to a new study, and they’re doing so almost entirely on social media (pictured).

Christina Sautter, a researcher at Southern Methodist University, created a term for these habitual governance devotees with their smartphones glued to their hands: “wireless investors”.

They are technologically adept and comfy on social platforms talking to everyone else out there in the virtual world.

This means, of course, that all company chairs must now register a TikTok account and deliver dance routines while singing the company accounts. Perhaps consult your medical adviser first. Or your therapist.

One for the Ides of March…

Bosses are apparently engaged in forcing employees out by making their jobs “unappealing” and threatening difficult performance reviews or—as it’s become known—“quiet firing”.

The tactics are being used, if you didn’t already know, to avoid mass, and very public, lay-offs.

Ben Hardy, clinical professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, told Business Insider that this approach has, in fact, always been used by companies. Though this does seem an advance on the “car park conversation”.

“Basically,” Hardy said, “the conversation was, ‘You can take redundancy and quietly go, or we can go through a performance review, and it’ll be miserable and grim. Which do you prefer?’”

The last time your correspondent was “let go”, it was through the “Oh-we’ve-redefined-your-job-so-we’re-putting-you-on-consultation-and-you-can-reapply-for-it” approach. And that was the day after the CEO’s declaration: “We’re all family here.” Just not a family anyone would ever recognise. Anyway, in case you’re wondering, no, I’m still not over it.