‘Woke’ workplace can’t work

She championed the cause of “respect, dignity and belonging for all”. She pushed for extra leave for “non-birthing parents”. She led a “mission on neurodiversity” for the firm. All policies pushed by Dimple Agarwal, Deloitte’s deputy chief executive and its head of “people and purpose”.

Now she has resigned her leadership roles after complaints from staff of bullying and harassment. Like Bill Michael at KPMG, who told staff to “stop moaning”, she was toast as soon as the story broke. The woke workplace is increasingly devouring itself.

Agarwal was probably always inviting trouble. When you speak up for every fashionable cause you can think of, your own behaviour is always likely to come under intense scrutiny.

Staff have accused her of bullying, of organising extremely early meetings despite all the stuff about work-life balance, and speaking “aggressively” to workers.

We don’t know what Agarwal was like to work with. Like many bosses, she was probably occasionally great, often average, and sometimes a nightmare. The trouble is, it is too easy to undermine a senior manager by throwing accusations of politically incorrect attitudes at them. Big companies that buy into wokedom have to roll over at any accusation of impropriety or unfairness.

It is obviously important that workplaces are respectful, colleagues are treated with dignity and perhaps most of all, that careers are opened up to people of all backgrounds. That is common sense, and ordinary decency.

But a box-ticking culture that makes gestures and symbols more important than the work itself is just as damaging.