Latest Blog Post

In terms of the business blog that I write here every week, this would be considered an HR (Human Resources), or HAM (Human Asset Management) blog.

Some while ago, we developed a Human Resources strategy in our business, which is as follows: ‘we use technology to make us more human’.

This is a personal thing, mostly driven by me in the first instance because I'm old, but what I cherish in my life is face-to-face human interaction. I cherish this when I go out with my family for dinner, I cherish it when I spend time with my friends on my bike, I cherish it when I meet strangers when I'm travelling, who are kind and decent.

I don't want to have a world where that's removed, and where all I do is interact with something electronic, and I don't want to have that in my business.

For that reason, I'm happy to free up members of my team using technology, as long as they are able to use the time that they are freed to be more interactive and more human. The analogy we use at the clinic is that we don't want receptionists to have less receptionists, we just want receptionists to talk more and be kinder to patients. For us, it seems to be working because we're growing at 10% or 12%, and more and more people are coming and commenting on how nice it is to be spoken to by a human.

I was prompted to write this because my nephew is just soon to finish having worked in the co-op in our hometown in Scotland for about four years, and I worked in Tesco in the same town more than 30 years ago for the same amount of time.

I always considered Co-op to be one of the decent supermarkets, the guys who were keen on service and keen on looking after communities, but the strategy now in the Co-op is to try to see whether it's possible to run the shop at different times of the day with one member of staff. Self-service checkouts will mean that no one has to talk to anyone, and it means that you can wander around the store and not see another member of staff and get help at the checkout if you absolutely need it.

It's mental.

One of the great stories of dehumanisation in human resources was the air traffic controllers' strike in the United States in 1981, just at the start of the Ronald Reagan era. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation (PATCO) went on strike in August 1981. You can argue for or against whether that should have happened, but what happened next was that Ronald Reagan gave them 48 hours to return to work, and when they did not, he fired over 11,000 on the spot and barred them from federal service permanently and for the rest of their lives.

Some of the people who were barred became destitute and never got a job again, and were forced into poverty or other means of income production. They managed to keep the system running for 2 to 3 years using military, non-strikers or volunteers, and what happened to the other side of that is that other people looked on at the dehumanisation of the workforce and said, " We can do that too”.

Prior to that, some people believed it was almost impossible for the CEO of a business to get rid of people within the business, to balance the books, and to make more profit. It is no longer difficult to do that, and the precedent was set all those years ago.

Let's be careful what we wish for, because if we get rid of all of our team or dehumanise them and stop looking after them, there might come a time in the future when we realise we needed them, and it will be really, really hard to get them back after the bridges have already been burned.