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