Jennifer Selway ‘Toxic culture’ or risky schmoozing?
WHAT does the Confederation of British Industry actually do? Or rather, what did the CBI do, as it doesn’t appear to have any members any longer. Mr Google tells me it “provides a voice for firms at a regional, national and international level to policymakers”.
It was formed in 1965 out of a merger of the Federation of British Industries, the British Employers’ Confederation and the National Association of British Manufacturers. It doesn’t make cheese or widgets or anything useful.
It represents 190,000 businesses who employ around seven million people.
Following revelations about sexual misconduct some of the CBI’S biggest members have scuttled to the moral high ground – and cancelled their subscriptions.
They include John Lewis, BMW, Virgin Media, 02, Aviva, Natwest, Mastercard, Channel 4 and Lloyds of London.
Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Rolls-royce and Unilever have suspended their membership for the time being.
You do wonder whether smallish firms pay the CBI’S hefty membership fees through fear of missing out on some notional benefit.a club you dare not not join.
On the other side of the coin this mass exodus of the big hitters represents the sort of hysteria we see so often now, a fear of contagion, of being seen to be in bad company.
Any company which fails to announce its departure risks being denounced as soft in the wake of the recent allegations. Ludicrous, but that’s where we are.
So what is this “toxic culture”, which might yet be purged by closing down the CBI altogether or (laughably) re-naming it?
In a self-flagellating open letter Brian Mcbride, president of the CBI, lamented: “We failed to filter out culturally toxic people during the hiring process.we failed to conduct proper cultural onboarding of staff.” Culturally this, cultural that.
What’s “cultural onboarding” when it’s at
home? Last week I wrote that the charges against former boss Tony Danker – which led to his immediate dismissal – seemed pretty thin. One allegation (not against him and before he joined it should be stressed) was from a woman who’d been out drinking with colleagues and woke up to find two men in her room plus signs that she’d had non-consensual sex.another was about a rape on a Thames boat summer party in 2019. Much drink had been taken.
Precisely because the CBI doesn’t make cheese or widgets, a lot of what it does involves schmoozing and drinking, or as we now say “reaching out” or “touching base”. This work-hard-play-hard lifestyle may sound very 1980s, but it’s still flourishing in the corporate world.
There isn’t some mysterious “toxic culture” creeping like a killer fungus through the CBI. It isn’t the CBI that needs to change, it’s society as a whole which has forgotten that while an employer has a duty of care, employees should also maintain professional standards and take pride in what they do. They don’t need “cultural onboarding”. They need to behave like decent human beings and not get drunk.