Amazon recently opened a fulfillment center about a mile from my house. The construction noise could be heard most days during my pandemic walks around the neighborhood. Now that it's completed, the noise hasn't dissipated but the whole facility is lit up brighter than an airport during the evenings. I'm glad our house doesn't directly face the warehouse. During this building process, I started to see more and more evidence of their attempts to hire workers to staff the new Area 51 dot com center. These postings haven't let up yet, and I don't imagine they will anytime soon.
Amazon isn't exactly known for their employee satisfaction, with labor disputes, and unionization efforts making headlines, and attempts to increase hourly wages having little to no impact on retention. A recent report revealed that less than a third of new hires stay with the company for longer than 90 days. That inability to retain employees cost Amazon $8 billion in 2021, which is almost a quarter of its annual net profit.
This may be an extreme example, but the stories of employees leaving their jobs or leaving the workforce completely continue to make the headlines. "Quiet quitting" and real quitting are real concerns for companies and organizations, and rightfully so. I would argue that this is perhaps an inevitable outcome of an oppressive capitalist system that was built to maximize profits over people. We're simply live-tweeting the tipping point as the ship begins to sink.
In 1924, The Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric factory outside Chicago, began conducting a series of experiments to measure potential increases in worker productivity. The most famous of these experiments involved adjustments to lighting within the factory and was the basis for the "Hawthorne effect", a term coined in 1958 by Henry Landsberger, to describe the experiments. Our obsession with efficiency and productivity has been around for well over 100 years at this point. The goal of all of this work is the same. Profit.
We may have begun by looking for ways to optimize the machines we use (think assembly line), but we very quickly moved on to thinking about how we can optimize employees. As soon as we began to view our employees as resources in the same way we view our machines, our goal became the same. Increase efficiency and productivity in the name of profit. That makes sense when thinking about inventing new and better ways of creating the goods we are taught to consume, but it runs off the assembly line when we view our employees as little more than resources to be optimized for efficiency. One of the quickest ways for all oppressive forces to take hold is to stop acknowledging the humanity in those around you.
The EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) recorded 73,485 discrimination complaints in 2022. Race (28.6%) and Sex (27%) not surprisingly led the list with the highest number of complaints. Often, a complaint gets filed with the EEOC when HR or an equivalent is unable to resolve the situation or the employee feels as though they can't bring the issue to their HR unit. Sufficed to say, a lack of understood humanity is no doubt at the heart of many of these complaints.
All of this is not to say that the utopian idea behind what "human resources" could be is flawed. Ideally, companies and organizations would look for ways to honor the humanity of their employees, create psychological safety for them, and create a sense of belonging within the communities that are formed. Unfortunately, we've long since reached a point where we felt the need to legislate behavior and create explicit policies to mandate the kinds of behavior that should be a natural byproduct of a well-functioning team or organization. In doing so, we've made it necessary to enforce those laws and policies, and have thus charged other employees with the oversight of these regulations. When you add in a highly litigious society where we sue people for just about anything, and it's no wonder companies are keen to protect themselves.
This reality has meant that a human resources department has no choice but to put aside any altruistic intentions it might have in favor of protecting the company or organization. In doing so, they end up as nothing more than carrot dispensaries and stick purveyors. If we want to foster a sense of belonging an significance among our employees, we need to stop viewing them as commodities or resources in the same way we view the machinery we operate. Let's give folks the opportunity to shift their focus away from managing human resources and towards the creation of significant and belonging-rich environments. I'm willing to bet the results will be even more productivity, with a healthy dose of equity and inclusion along the way.
