Let’s humanize more the workplace … unless you’re a robot
Before the soothsayers’ doomsday scenarios happen, we have reasons to rejoice. Gurus say that half of the jobs today could already be done better, faster, and at least cost by robots and artificial intelligence. Until the robots, or the apes, or the aliens (depending on which book you’re reading, or movie you’re watching) shall have taken over, we still work in a place filled with humans. So, let’s humanize the workplace.
Dehumanized workplace
Over the past 2,000 years, managers, executives, and employees alike have contributed to dehumanizing the workplace. Working in a corporation for some has become corporate slavery. People have become crankier, hassled, cajoled, harassed, and bullied. It’s about time we take notice of this growing malady and do something about it.
Lynn Taylor is the author of a best selling book, “Tame your TOT.” TOT means “Terrible Office Tyrant.” She says, “Humanizing the workplace is something that everyone – executives, managers, and employees – can undertake to create together a better work environment. It always translates into a more profitable business as well.”
According to Taylor, a humanized workplace has the following characteristics: sensitivity to the human spirit, collaboration towards shared goals, use of real words driven from the heart instead of the typical corporate “babblespeak” borne out of career insecurity or mimicking the boss, acknowledgement of workers’ positive contributions, an occasional ? in an email or text, and presence of humor as a diffuser of tension.
On the other hand, a dehumanized workplace is one where robot-like, icy behaviors can cause alienation, has no place for “please” or “thank you”, and where people has demands, not requests. It’s where people step on each other’s toes, instead of putting themselves in other’s shoes.
What’s eating us up?
In a 2013 survey, Gallup concludes that 85 percent of workers worldwide are disengaged. The initial enthusiasm for the job fades after six months. We now have the ability to communicate and befriend any sign of life hundreds of light years away in another galaxy, but we often don’t care much about the new guy who sits beside our cubicle. To some, he’s just an employee number, a possible career competitor.
New technologies have “fostered a stressful culture of extreme connectivity, employee monitoring, and relentless efficiency pressures at work.” The very same technology that keeps us connected is often the reason why we are not one with our family, friends, and team.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreesen said, “Software is not only eating the world. It is also eating our spirits.”
Technology is a double-bladed tool. It helps us to do our work better and faster. It also induces stress, reduces the meaning and dignity of everyday work, and often erodes the trust in our leaders and colleagues at work.
Humanizing the workplace
Somehow, there’s a glimmer of hope when you hear that some business leaders are working to humanize the workplace again through work-life integration, workplace experience, and helping workers find meaning and purpose in their work.
Social partners must start exploring new workplace arrangements such as flexible schedules, telecommuting, work-at-home, home-at-work, family-friendly benefits, and other reforms that will help integrate work and life. Enterprises must also begin to adjust traditional structures and policies to “a more socially progressive, mobile, and demanding millennial workforce.” HR managers must learn to reframe their functions and play the role of employee champions more purposively.
HR must focus more on creating healthful workplaces, promote individual wellbeing of employees and their families, and help ensure greater mental health and happiness. In a workplace where stress and sometimes depression await the human employee at every aspect of the employee experience that seems to glorify a culture of constant busyness at work, keeping the employee sane and worry-free will bring dividends to the enterprise in terms of greater productivity. At least, it could lessen depression and suicidal tendencies among millennials.
In the words of a CEO, “The challenge is to connect a lofty purpose with the day-to-day work experience, for it will otherwise ring hollow and lead more quickly to cynicism than a culture that doesn't care much about others to begin with.”
As for me, employee engagement does not happen as a matter of course, or by accident. Engagement happens when the boss knows how to engender emotional connection between the employee and his work, boss or company. The workplace is where the action is. Key elements of employee engagement are play, surprise, and even mystery. Bosses and HR leaders must learn to use these as their tools to humanize the workplace. Or else, they’re no better than robots. (Email: erniececilia@gmail.com)
The challenge is to connect a lofty purpose with the day-to-day work experience, for it will otherwise ring hollow and lead more quickly to cynicism than a culture that doesn't care much about others to begin with.