Today’s Society Summed up

The sacking of a group of HSBC employees sums up beautifully what is so wrong with our society. So here’s what happened.

HSBC has fired six staff after they performed a mock Islamic State-style execution video during a team-building day and posted footage online, a bank spokesman said on Tuesday.

The bank described the video, showing staff members in balaclavas holding a fake knife over a kneeling man in an orange jumpsuit, as “abhorrent”.

“We took the decision to sack the individuals involved,” a spokesman for the bank said.

“This is an abhorrent video and HSBC would like to apologise for any offence caused.”

The UK employees filmed the video on an HSBC team-building day and published it on Instagram before deleting it, according to the Sun newspaper, which published screen shots of the clip.

I have no sympathy with either party in this sorry little episode, but as an object lesson in modern Britain, it couldn’t be bettered. Firstly, we have a large organisation that thinks money is well spent on stupid team building exercises. These things are always a waste of time, effort and money and achieve nothing. We work as teams naturally when we have to – artificial days away don’t make the slightest bit of difference.

Then we have the perpetual fear of the offenderati. I mean, seriously. This was a stupid stunt. It was certainly tasteless, but for fuck’s sake, sacking people over it? A rap over the knuckles and a written warning, certainly, but sacking was way over the top for what can best be described as high jinks. No one was harmed. The bank was not, despite its obvious fears, brought into disrepute (you’d be hard pressed to bring the HSBC into more disrepute than it already is anyway). But, no, someone, somewhere, might be offended, so heads must roll and faux apologies made even if no one was, actually, offended.

As for the dickheads who engaged in the stunt – well, it was puerile certainly and in exceedingly bad taste. But who hasn’t at some point engaged in bad taste? No, what these twats did – despite clear precedents that should have warned them – was to post it on the internet. Now that is the height or stupidity. The offenderati are just waiting in the wings looking for something to be offended by – and if they aren’t, twitchy employers are watching on their behalf.

So there we have it – everyone is running scared of the offendatrons. Free speech – even if it is stupid, childish, offensive and puerile (the best kind, surely), is dead.

I don’t  much like modern Britain.

10 Comments

  1. Dear Mr Longrider

    “…so heads must roll…”

    Please let that be a quote from HSBC HR department.

    “…and HSBC would like to apologise for any offence caused.”

    I am offended by their grovelling apology. Will they be sacking themselves?

    “Team building” is a waste of time, but much more fun than working.

    DP

    • ‘More fun than working’?

      Personally I’d far rather be back at the grindstone achieving something than taking part in a set of silly role plays or ‘challenges’ knowing that management’s beady eyes are peeled for any signs of dangerous cynicism.

      It would be interesting to know what the original task was and whether it was poor design that allowed it to be subverted. The trouble with these ‘team-building’ exercises is that there are too many managers out there with too little to do, too much money to spend and a propensity to fall for a flash-sounding pitch: take, for example, the activity devised by a celebrated Australian psychologist for employees of a food retailer, in which in which she “made a wok out of beanbags and asked them to act out being a stir fry”.

      Her justification for this undignified exercise? “Nobody tries to explain what we get out of it directly – it’s understood. It’s our freshness store cupboard”. Truly the Emperor has no clothes.

      • “The trouble with these ‘team-building’ exercises is that there are too many managers out there with too little to do, too much money to spend and a propensity to fall for a flash-sounding pitch”

        Absolutely spot on!

      • LOL – I once interviewed for a market research company which ‘specialised’ in capturing the great unwashed’s attitude towards products. “Specialised” is in inverted commas because, irrespective of the product, the questionnaire was always the same. I refused to take any more work from them when I had to ask the question, “If [brand of loo paper] was a human being, what kind of person would it be?” Another example for Pseuds Corner.

  2. I suspect a good advocate at the industrial tribunal hearings will have HSBC paying out handsome compo for summary dismissal without going through the correct procedures.

    But anyway, can’t the company fritter money away quickly enough on cobblers like team building, maybe if they recruited staff with an ounce of common sense in the first place etc etc, although the company and staff of this calibre deserve each other,

  3. If I’d been their boss, I’d have sacked them – and I’m damned if I’d have apologised for it.

    This country has gone mad…

    • What for? Being dickheads? If that’s your criterion, you would be doing a lot of sacking.

      If I was their employer, the situation would never have arisen because they would have been at their desks, working.

  4. But doesn’t HSBC have a duty of care to make sure people hyped-up during ‘team building’ don’t do stupid things?

  5. The only thing they did wrong was not to observe Chatam House rules and posted the video to the Internet.

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