Work can be dehumanizing. A friend of mine and I have had this conversation for years: He says the tipping point was when we changed the name of the department from “personnel” to “human resources.” While personnel has a military ring to it, it’s better than resources. Coal and pork bellies are resources.
Recently I had an emotional response to a mock-humanizing shift in corporate culture. My VP and his directors suggested we call our new e-learning system “sensei.” I hated the idea. A fancy database is not a sensei. It sounded like he was trying too hard to be Japanese; my employer is an American branch of a Japanese parent company.
I asked them to get some native Japanese input on this; they did, and the Japanese folks were fine with it.
The problem, then, were my feelings on the matter. I had to step back and chew on it a while.
I realized that the reaction I had to “sensei” was due to having one throughout my 20s and 30s, and now being one. My own sensei was a father figure to me (my father died when I was young), so I wasn’t being rational where this term was concerned. Also, most of my Japanese friends are via the arts I’ve practiced, and sensei has special meaning for them that it doesn’t have for the typical Japanese. So, my understanding was skewed, and human.
In fairness, sensei is not a magical term. It just means teacher. It’s a term also used for lawyers, and other experts.
So, just as I decided to let traditional uniforms go, I had to let traditional ownership of a word go. The whole Japanese martial thing has gotten silly and over-used, anyway. Today, you can get a black belt in project management (Six Sigma); in Japan, you can get dan (expert) degrees in baseball.
So, now we’re human resources, and a computer is our sensei. Fine.
Is it any wonder that I teach karate at a church? I could do it at a city rec center, but that never intuitively appealed to me. I am, perhaps desperately, holding on to the few sacred things I’ve found that survived into the 21st century, pruning and tending them, hoping they survive our cultural winter. I am Don Quixote, jousting with data farms, an anachronism bleeding into a blog, looking for what? Dignity? Doesn’t that come from within?
“We’ve learned that when companies treat talent as a commodity, the consequences are severe,” said Ms. Toledano of Electronic Arts. “It takes years to repair a reputation.”
Of course it does. But when that inner dignity is not nurtured by the environment, eventually, it dies. And there seem to me few dignified environments left in this world.
I’ve had an evolving view on this subject over my career.
When I first entered corporate America (20+ years ago), working for EDS/Enron I was too gung-ho to notice. I was a company man all the way and intended on working for EDS my whole life. It took about 5 years for that crap to wear off.
Then I got into career building mode, but at least realized that upper-management was generally made up of people of low moral character. And it’s generally from these people that the corporate culture is established. Enron and Merrill Lynch were really bad because they would not only sacrifice their employees for the bottom line, they would take that next step and try and swindle them (like when Key Lay told employees to buy stock while he was dumping it… Or Merrill Lynch asking employees to do illegal things to save their jobs all the while putting them in a position to be the scapegoat.)
Amoral is about the best you could hope for in a large corporation, which is what I found at Koch and Ceva. They too would screw you as an employee, but it was nothing personal… just what the spreadsheet dictated. At least they didn’t view you a chump or victim to be fleeced.
The one rule I did discover in all those years is that the more a company talks about how much it values its employees the more the exact opposite is true.
I think you’re right about human resource departments. It’s no accident that in Dilbert the head of the department is an evil cat who takes sadistic pleasure in torturing the employees.
At the end of all this, I’ve now moved to a small town and now work for a small company in which I can name every employee. And I have to say it’s refreshing moving from the Immoral or Amoral to the Moral.
>The one rule I did discover in all those years is that the more a company talks about how much it values its employees the more the exact opposite is true.
100% agreed. When they start crafting mission statements, it’s time to get out the lube. :)
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