De-humanising the workforce

I recently had a Twitter conversation with a colleague in direct messages which followed on from a post I had made in regards to me saying "Finding it quite bizarre to find I am a virtual commodity". My post was referring to the fact that I had just opened an account on Empire Avenue and my social presence was being traded like shares. However his reply was "It could be worse, how about non-existence?"

However my cynical mind had already been encompassing the concept of being a resource whether virtual or otherwise and my realisation that corporations attempt just that trick. My response of "In some respects the dehumanising is precisely that" was a tad too much for my colleague who was not expecting the depth of philosophical argument at the time of the morning especially not being fortified by the caffeine levels requisite to that mental challenge.

But it comes down to this. In many areas (not all, as some are more enlightened than others) the workforce has been completely dehumanised. Even the language has changed to reflect this paradigm. Once we talked to Personnel, now we bow to Human Resources. Because that is what we have become. A resource. The concerns for our welfare are almost intrinsically linked to the bottom line. We cease to have a human face and become a number, an object that can be deployed and redeployed at will.

Part of the company that I work for went even further by ensuring that we were going to be 'agile' and mobile as a workforce and then they proceeded to ensure we did not have a fixed desk to work at. Attempts to personalise any area or even reserve an area were dealt with from being frowned upon to the very active censuring of any attempt to be human. Ostensibly this was to help us become more efficient but when you arrived at a building and had to search for 30 minutes to find a free desk that was not only available but had working phone, network and power as well, this revealed the lie of it all. Not only that but the 'drawer' you were allocated as storage could be on another floor! This may have worked for the development teams inured in this methodology but for the rest of the peop ... sorry ... resources the 'one size fits all' approach just didn't work.

After a while the dehumanizing approach lent itself to the way that we did job descriptions and how we managed work. We were all templated into a 'job standard' which, by its inflexibility, allowed the company to define what you could, would and should be doing. A good idea you may think. Unless you want some creativity in your company to ensure it doesn't stagnate.

But what about the effect on morale? Take-up of the voluntary redundancy terms in the company was high year on year even when they reduced the attractiveness of the terms. But maybe that was the aim. Less resource

Builders houses

It is fair to say that I have quite some history with the internet and the web. I once delivered a talk about the likelihood of the web being the ubiquitous interface to applications and systems in the near future to a large room of developers in 1994, the vast majority of which scoffed at the concept. Following closely on that I started teaching HTML to those who had previously scoffed and worked on one of the first intranet servers in the company (now one of the largest intranets in Europe).

As with builders and their houses about the only web site that I hadn't ever worked on was my own. And that remains the case to this day.

I purchased my own domain way back in 2003 and the hosting to go with it. I have also worked on others sites and built and maintained them for some years but never my own.

Don't get me wrong. I do maintain a social presence and am active in many social media contexts. I just found it hard to start to create a site that defined my presence. And why is that? Because I realised I don't have a cohesive presence. I am a mishmash of iconoclastic opinion, socio-politically concerned thinker and casual gamer as well as many other aspects to me and my approach to life. To create a site to reflect all these aspects is quite some task especially given the wrap around them. Add to this a concern about privacy (one of my bugbears), an aversion to the self-conscious egotism of many of the so-called pundits (another bugbear) and the obnoxious bloggadocio (the only term I have any gratitude for from the appalling Socialnomics book) of people having such wonderful lives that they find so much time to be able to tweet and blog extensively about it and shame us all that we are not as active and fortunate as they are.

This task is onerous not only because I have an aversion to that depth of self-publication but also a need for people to understand that I do have more than one dimension. Also because technically, reflecting those division of myself is something that most solutions are incapable of representing.

Enter the popular incumbents for self-publication: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal! Massively supported and extensible with a host of possibilities to alter and shape to fit my needs ... or at least that's the theory. The principal problem is that all of these solutions are predicated on the idea that the user/author/ego will want a theme that runs throughout the site that is consistent with the ideas behind it. Erm ... no ... I want each sub-section to change because they are a different side to me.

Then you can have additional modules that will incorporate your other aspects via integration with other sites that have content by and for you. As long as they are consistently displayed in the pages where we want them to be.

But hang on. If I want a page that looks at my book reading, my music tastes etc. I don't want the integration to happen in a side bar, I want it within the section in the middle of the page. I don't want it superceded by any content I add subsequently or any verbiage I may decide is suitable for that type of content. So can I do that? No.

But, my friends argue, surely you want consistency for the site? Cohesion of ideas and themes so people can navigate around easily? Actually no I don't. I want people to be aware of the different side of me that they are confronting.

And then I look and stop and realise that while I may have an aversion to the self-important egotism and blogadoccio, I am quite willing to inflict myself on the world in that fashion

So I stop ... until the next time