Human resources

Once known as personnel then, in the heady days before banking become an embarrassing career choice human capital management, now usually known as human resources, possibly the least resourceful group of humans to ever emerge from the dark ages of free enterprise.

There is a view that they are some extended phenotype of ours, or that we are of theirs, the same way it can be said that wheat domesticated homo sapiens.

It will be HR which hatches the plan to spend hundreds of thousands promoting a back-to-work scheme for those who took a career break when they had kids, despite having spent the last ten years systematically making redundant those who decided to stay on.

They will both publicly deny and privately insist on forced ranking and will insist on taking a hard line on disciplinary action - in the interests of fairness and transparency - and will then decline to permit the consequences (ie firing the poor sod) because of the risk of procedural unfairness in doing so.

Fears:

• constructive dismissal
• divers