HR's press is built for risk. Who's writing for performance?

21 Oct 2026 

I went looking for soft. I found scared.

I have a theory, and I'm rather attached to it. I read the HR titles all the time (more out of habit than joy, if I'm honest), and every time I open one I seem to be wading through parental leave, menopause policies, bereavement support, baby loss awareness weeks and yet another survey about how stressed we all are. Meanwhile the economy is doing its best impression of a stalled car, AI is quietly hollowing out the entry-level job market, recruitment has become a branch of the dark arts, and UK productivity remains the mountain nobody seems to have packed boots for. Where, I keep asking myself, is all the writing about how to actually get work done? My working title for this piece was 'HR has gone soft'.

So I decided to test it. Properly, with data, which is the only way I know how to win an argument with myself. The HR press is 'always on', a daily drip that never really stops, so what follows is a snapshot: six months frozen in time, from a stream that will have moved on by the time you read this. But I'd be surprised if the shape of it has.

And I was wrong. Well, half wrong, which in my experience is the most interesting way to be wrong. The HR press hasn't gone soft. It has gone defensive. It is organised, almost to the point of obsession, around risk: what the law now demands, what the latest tribunal decided, how grim the labour market looks this month. Wellbeing is there, but it is a steady trickle rather than the flood I'd imagined. What is genuinely missing is the craft of getting work done, shown through real organisations doing it well. And that, I think, is a bigger problem than a few too many articles about menopause.

What I looked at

Four titles that most of us in the profession read: Personnel Today, People Management, HR Grapevine and HRD Connect. Every article they published between 21 April and 21 October 2026 – 1,783 of them – read and coded by headline into one primary theme, and then by what kind of piece it was: news, survey, tribunal write-up, commentary, how-to guide, or (the rare beast) an employer describing what it did.

I was deliberately harsh on my own theory. A tribunal case about a woman sacked after a miscarriage went down as 'law', not 'wellbeing', even though my original grumble would happily have claimed it. If the soft stuff was going to win, it was going to have to win fair and square.

One honest caveat before anyone writes in to tell me (and someone will): I coded headlines, not full articles. It is entirely possible that a piece headlined 'Nine in ten organisations unprepared for change' goes on to explain, in loving detail, how a handful of them sorted it out. The body copy may well be broader than the headline suggests. But headlines are what editors choose to lead with, which is evidence in itself, and if the how-to really were tucked away inside, you'd expect it to break cover in a headline at least occasionally. In six months and 1,783 articles, it did so 84 times. That isn't a hidden seam of practice. It's a dearth.

Not soft. Defensive.

The single biggest theme, by a distance, is law. Employment law, compliance and tribunals account for 496 of the 1,783 articles, which is 28% of everything, and nearly a third of the output at both Personnel Today (30%) and People Management (33%). Some of that is the Employment Rights Act doing what big legislation does to trade press, and fair enough. But much of it is a genre all of its own: the tribunal write-up, of which there were 162, usually with the award in the headline. Fish packer wins £11k. NHS director wins £118k. Pharmacist awarded €50k. It is gripping in the way that a motorway pile-up is gripping, and roughly as instructive about how to drive.

And here's the thing that dented my theory. When I looked at what the legal stories were actually about, the biggest slice wasn't pregnancy, menopause or harassment. It was pay, hours, contracts and worker status (89 articles: zero hours, guaranteed hours, minimum wage, holiday pay, IR35). The family and health cases that I'd assumed were everywhere came to 59, and harassment another 22. Under 5% of all coverage.

Add in the labour-market commentary (another 12%, and 17% at Personnel Today, much of it some variation on 'vacancies fall again, young people hardest hit') and you get a picture of a profession being briefed, daily, on the things that could go wrong. Wellbeing and support, my supposed villain, sits at a fairly modest 12%. Performance and capability, for the record, manages 15%.

So, not soft. If anything the profession is being trained to flinch.

Discussed, not demonstrated

Now, 15% for performance and capability doesn't sound like a famine. Until you look at what those 260 articles are. Just over four in ten are commentary (someone's view on the future of work, usually with the word 'reimagined' in it). Three in ten are surveys, and the surveys have a very particular flavour: over half of L&D teams struggle to identify what their workforce needs to learn; almost nine in ten organisations are unprepared for change; only one in four employees feel ready to use AI. Each is a perfectly reasonable finding. Lined up together they read like a doctor's waiting room in which everyone is describing their symptoms and nobody has seen the doctor.

The number of articles in which a named organisation explains how it improved performance, rebuilt its skills base or planned its workforce? Twenty-five. Out of 1,783. That is 1.4%.

Across every theme, only 84 articles (under 5%) showed an employer doing something, and 53 of those came from a single title, HR Grapevine, mostly through its CPO interviews (Maersk replacing performance reviews with 'skills canvases', Edgewell building a skills taxonomy, Canva shutting the whole company down for a week of AI upskilling, Lloyds putting £100m into future skills). Good on them. Personnel Today, the busiest of the four, managed 14 in six months, most of them early-careers schemes. HRD Connect, which pitches itself at senior HR leaders, managed none at all.

And if you want the statistic I keep repeating to anyone who'll stand still long enough: across all four titles, in six months, workforce planning made it into a headline three times. Menopause made it twelve times. Bereavement and baby loss eleven.

Performance management managed ten, eight of them in People Management. I'm not suggesting the menopause coverage should stop (it matters, and plenty of employers still get it badly wrong), but if you were a visiting Martian trying to work out what HR is for, you would not conclude it had anything much to do with making sure an organisation can actually do what it exists to do.

Holding it up against the Profession Map

This is where it gets uncomfortable, because the profession has already told us what it thinks HR is for. The CIPD Profession Map puts 'better work and working lives' at its centre, and asks us to be principles-led, evidence-based and outcomes-driven (CIPD, 2026). Note the order of that purpose. Better work comes first. Working lives come second.

The map then sets out eleven specialist knowledge areas, and it is genuinely instructive to lay six months of coverage across them. I've had to do this approximately, since I coded by theme rather than by specialism, but the shape is hard to argue with:

Profession Map specialism	Roughly how much coverage it got
Employee relations (incl. employment law and tribunals)	About 31%
Wellbeing	12%
Resourcing	7%
Equality, diversity and inclusion	6%, plus most of the 70 equality tribunal stories
Reward	4%
Learning and development, talent management, organisation development and design, people analytics, employee experience	Sharing the 15% for performance and capability, mostly as commentary
Workforce planning	3 headlines in six months

So the specialism that arguably matters most to an organisation trying to survive AI, an ageing workforce and a tight budget all at once (knowing what work you'll need done, by whom, with what skills, and when) is the one the profession's own media almost never mentions. Workforce planning is right there on the map with its own standards. It just doesn't get written about.

Look down the list and you'll find no specialism called 'performance' and none called 'productivity'. In the map's own one-line summaries, performance gets a single mention (under organisation development and design) and productivity none at all. I'm not saying the CIPD doesn't care about productivity (it plainly does, and its own festival now bills itself around organisational productivity), but if the map is the profession's picture of itself, the thing UK Inc most needs from us is something you have to go looking for between the lines. The trade press, perfectly reasonably, writes for the bits that are spelt out. Is it any wonder, then, that the coverage clusters around employee relations and wellbeing, which have both a clear specialism and a steady supply of legislation and tribunals to report on?

Why UK Inc should care

Output per hour in the UK in the first quarter of 2026 was just 3.5% above where it was in 2019 (Productivity Institute, 2026). Seven years, three and a half per cent.

Productivity is, at bottom, a people question: how work is designed, who does it, with what skills, how well they're managed, and whether anyone has noticed that half the job could now be done differently. Those are precisely the questions HR is supposed to own. Yet the profession's daily reading teaches it to manage exposure rather than create value. If your information diet is tribunal awards, statutory deadlines and survey after survey of things going wrong, you will, quite rationally, become very good at not getting sued. You will not necessarily become the person the CEO turns to when she wants to know whether the business has the workforce to deliver next year's plan.

Which brings me back to the old complaint about HR and the boardroom. We keep asking why we don't get a seat at the table, or get one and then play second fiddle to Finance. Well. One of the four titles ran a story this year about a ride-hailing CEO who 'got rid' of HR for creating problems that didn't exist. I don't agree with him (I'd quite like to see who's minding his tribunal risk in two years' time), but I understand how he got there. If HR presents itself as risk manager and welfare officer, the board will treat it as a cost of compliance. And costs of compliance get cut.

So what would help?

I'm not about to blame the editors. They write what gets read, and a sacked steward and a 'mile-high club' comment will outperform a thoughtful piece on strategic workforce planning every day of the week (sadly, I suspect that includes the people reading this). But a few things would shift the balance.

To the editors: for every tribunal write-up, how about one case study of an organisation that redesigned work and can show the numbers before and after? HR Grapevine is proving there are CPOs willing to talk. The rest of us would read it, honestly we would.

To the CIPD, which after all publishes one of these four titles: if productivity is the profession's big contribution to the national interest, could it be named on the map rather than inferred from it? And could workforce planning, which is already on there, be given a bit of oxygen in People Management? Three headlines in six months across the whole sector barely qualifies as a rumour.

In fairness (and I do like to be fair), there are signs that someone at the top has noticed. Neil Carberry, the CIPD's new chief executive, used his very first outing in the role (the People Management Awards, before he had technically even started) to say something I would have written myself. "There is nothing particularly revolutionary about saying that people and skills drive performance," he wrote. "The more striking point is that, despite saying it for years, so many employers don't consistently act as if they do" (Carberry, 2026). He goes on to list the questions keeping chief executives awake: do we have the skills to deliver our strategy, are managers equipped to lead through change, are we redesigning work as technology develops, are we actually getting any productivity out of all this AI investment? These, he says, are "not secondary organisational questions". Hallelujah.

Better still, he puts his finger on exactly the gap this analysis found. The profession, he argues, needs to be much clearer about "not simply the processes we run, but the problems we solve", and the seat in the room is won "by demonstrating how we make a difference", not by shouting about it. He even concedes that not everything done in the name of HR over the past decade has delivered, which is refreshingly undefensive for a professional body (and not a sentence you often hear from the top of any profession). If the CIPD means it, then the obvious place to start is its own magazine, where the how-to is currently outnumbered by commentary and tribunal reports. It is early days, and one LinkedIn article does not make a change of emphasis. But it is the right article. I'll be watching, with my spreadsheet, to see whether the next six months look any different from the last.

And to the rest of us in practice (myself very much included), the hard one. Case studies don't get written if nobody offers them up. If you've planned a workforce through an AI rollout, re-mapped skills across a business, or finally sorted out performance management so that it improves performance (rather than generating a form that everyone fills in the night before), then write it up. Warts and all. The failures would be even more useful than the successes, though I accept that's a harder sell to your comms team.

Because the alternative is that we carry on being very well informed about everything that could go wrong, and strangely quiet about how to make anything go right. Is that really the profession we signed up for?

A note on method

All articles published by Personnel Today (791), People Management (592), HR Grapevine (327, UK news and in-depth only) and HRD Connect (73) between 21 April and 21 October 2026 were coded by headline, one primary theme and one article type each. Tribunal cases were coded as law whatever their subject. People Management dates are taken from its sitemap and are accurate to the month. Coding was by headline only, not article content, so the body of some pieces may cover more ground than their headline suggests. Headline coding by a single coder will also involve judgement calls; moving any one category to the other side of the argument does not change the overall picture.

References

Carberry, N. (2026) Growth starts with people. LinkedIn, 25 September 2026.

CIPD (2026) The Profession Map: specialist knowledge. Available at: cipd.org (accessed 21 October 2026).

CIPD (2026) Explore the Profession Map. Available at: cipd.org (accessed 21 October 2026).

CIPD (2026) Latest news from the CIPD. Available at: cipd.org (accessed 21 October 2026).

Productivity Institute (2026) Q1 2026: UK productivity edges up as the UK leads the G7 for GDP growth amid uncertainty. Available at: lab.productivity.ac.uk (accessed 21 October 2026).