If corporations wish to be treated with a legal status equivalent to person-hood, we may be compelled to also assign other attributes normally reserved for true individuals. For example, corporations presenting an apparent lack of empathy, engaging in privately amoral activities, whilst outwardly appearing to be functionally normal participants in the business community would – by the definitions of person-hood – qualify as psychopathic.
Over the past several years, I’ve come to feel that there are two ways to quantify your workforce. One way is to classify your workers as valued assets functioning with assigned roles as resources specializing in appropriate tasks.
The other way is to treat them like people.
This is an important – and I would hope obvious and natural – distinction. In the first perspective, you are viewing human beings in the same manner you would view an instrument in your toolbox. As a responsible professional, you may keep them clean and organized, but you are inherently detached from any consideration that might not normally apply to inanimate objects. If you need a hammer, and you have a wrench, you might pound the nail anyway. Or you might go find a hammer because that’s the better choice.
In either case, the carpenter isn’t investing much thought into how the hammers or wrenches feel about those choices. My concern about our modern corporate society is that we have a tendency to begin applying this sense of detachment to people. I don’t necessarily think it starts out malicious or intentional, and I believe it occurs with such subtly that we probably don’t even feel it happening.
Why do companies exist? Unless an organization sprang spontaneously from nothing (or was fractured from a larger organization), most companies start small and (hopefully) grow. At first, they might be described as a cooperative gathering of compatibly skilled individuals pursuing a common goal – some or all of which includes the need to be employed. After all, we live in a society that functions on the exchange of intangibles, and having a cause is good but not useful if you starve in the process.
And so the “small business” occurs, and everybody works hard, and everybody knows each other and (theoretically) gets along. The division of responsibility is so blurred that even organizational hierarchy is informal. Everyone is invested in the fate of their fellows because that fate is tied to the health of the company as a whole.
With time and success, the company grows. Somewhere in the resulting transition, interpersonal cohesiveness can begin to dissolve. Not always, I’m sure – I’ve never worked at Netflix, but their mission overview claims a focus on avoiding this problem. I would suspect, however, that it happens a lot. The shear size of some companies would make personalized interconnectivity almost impossible.
Something else can happen, too: The nature and goal of the company can shift. Although superficially the organization remains apparently committed to a social agenda, and issues like workplace satisfaction and retention continue to receive attention, the company no longer emphasizes the value of the staff over the importance of the company as an “entity”.
I’m not trying to sound naive here – I understand that companies that do not grow and remain profitable cannot survive, which certainly destroys the job security of its employees. What I’m trying to describe is the notion that a small company exists so that employees can earn money and consumers can receive a product. In contrast, many large companies appear to exists so that a select number of individuals (at the top) can earn money by any means.
If that transition occurs, people stop being people and become “assets”. The size and prestige of the organization ensures its ability to survive independent of its individual parts. What starts as healthy redundancy turns into streamlining and competition for efficiency. The perspective of the common worker loses value – who cares what one hammer thinks, when they’re so easy to pick up from the store?
I don’t know that this effect is universal. I can’t claim to have enough corporate experience to say beyond personal observation that the trend is even common. I’m sure when it does happen, there are increasingly obvious signs. I would expect these start as elements of structure, some of which are adopted by necessity and some of which are embraced as conventions. ”This is what the big boys do,” as it were. I’m sure it’s a mixed emotion moment. On the one hand, you may be watching the soul of your small company die. On the other, you’re might be witness to a rebirth – an eruption from the ashes of insignificance into something with greater strength and survivability.
I suspect this depends a bit on whether you’re riding the head of the phoenix, or standing in the pile below.
I also can’t suggest a solution; I can imagine a philosophy to avoid it (like the Netflix culture), but I can’t say for certain whether this is effective or portable. I would speculate key elements of a successful plan would include promoting continued communication among your employees (i.e. don’t let the ever increasing staff size turn everybody into strangers) and reasoned consideration during the adoption of “large corporate policy”. There are changes that help the bottom line, and then there are changes that don’t hurt the bottom line but do affect morale, and perhaps those are better avoided or discussed as a group.
So my advice to employees? Don’t be tools. And to employers, I’d say don’t be carpenters.
