Humanity at Workspace

Recently there has been a lot of news about Layoffs. It has kind of become a trend. Every other day we read that X company is laying off thousands of employees. Such news is followed by responses of affected employees who express how the layoff decision was so sudden and how they were not prepared for such a thing to happen to them.

As spectators, for us these are only “numbers”. The news agencies report the number of employees laid off. When the management takes such decisions, again it is only numbers for them. But we often conveniently forget that these are not merely numbers and are “Human Beings”. We should not forget that these are breadwinners of the family on whose shoulders there is responsibility to provide the next meal.

Nowadays, Bosses are not called Boss/Reporting Manager/Manager anymore. We call them “People Manager” in HR terminology. Maybe, the term was introduced to remind the bosses and/or leaders that they are managing people and not some assets which can be bought and laid off as & when required. But now, I think it is time to change the term again and call them as “Human Managers” to remind them that they are working with their fellow Human Beings.

In my professional life, I have had an opportunity to work with one of the finest human beings. He was admired by all for his values, his principles, his vision and most importantly his people management skills. He always stressed on “Dignity of an individual”.

During my experience of working with him, I have learnt that whatever be the circumstances, however the employee performs, his / her dignity as an individual should always be maintained. We should never forget to respect him / her as a fellow human being. Employees could be from different ranks and grades based on their professional roles and designations. But as an individual, all employees are equal human beings.

I believe all the organisations should adopt this philosophy. The larger responsibility does lie with the people in leadership positions who are responsible for all the humans under them. With the capitalist ideology, most leaders take responsibility of numbers such as revenue, expense and employee count. But they don’t really take responsibility of maintaining humanity in their team.

If someone performs good and achieves targets, they’re applauded, appreciated, maybe even give monetary bonus and that is it. When the same person performs bad, the same leader would be quick to put the employee in the line of fire, maybe even shout at them and dismiss them. The complete relationship is just driven by business performance. The same leadership could be very accommodating to one person who is believed to be performing good and be outright mean, insulting to another person from the same team. This is where we stop valuing dignity of individuals, this is where we stop respecting them as human beings.

We should always remember that all employees are humans first and deserve equal respect. Their designations, grades, ranks are secondary adjectives. If they do well, we should encourage them to do better. If they don’t do well, we should take joint responsibility of the failure. We should acknowledge that as leaders somewhere even we were not as attentive as required. We did not identify that they were struggling and having difficult time. Once we accept our failure too as a leader, we should sit down and talk and understand what went wrong, how we could have avoided the issues and why and what needs to be done to either correct the situation or ensure that same issues don’t happen again. Then together, we should plan and take measures to improve the performance of the employees.

Sometimes, organisations do go through some difficult phases where they need to make sacrifices. There is nothing wrong in laying off people. If by laying off few employees, we can save the organisation and jobs of many, it becomes the right step for the greater good. But the process of lay off should be gentle. We should remember they are people who trusted the organisation with their careers and trusted the organisation to support them in exchange of using their skills. The managers need to have heart-to-heart talk and explain the reasons for taking the decision. They should respectfully inform the employees of their decision and if possible, even provide them assistance to find new jobs. The exit should be made respectfully and on good positive note and not cut the ties sharply like with a knife.

The ultimate responsibility of the HR and Management is to remember that when they recruit employees, they are not recruiting robots to fulfil their needs. They are recruiting human beings with emotions and hence they should be treated with utmost respect during their tenure with us. Criticism should be for work done badly but not for the individual. That is true Professionalism.

What are your thoughts on the same?