“Sin," declared the late, beloved author Terry Pratchett, "is when you treat people like things." He believed that evil begins when you stop seeing people as fully human and instead as objects to be manipulated. That’s a tension felt in every organization, by any productivity manager and within any HR department. How do we find the balance between “human” and “resources?”
During this June’s record-breaking high temperatures in the US, Marcio Rodriguez, a ramp worker at an Amazon air hub in Kentucky, began encouraging his colleagues not to start their shifts until the company fixed the broken air conditioning in its vans. This was not a new complaint but merely the latest in a long string of bad news stories about insufficient cooling for workers, including one man’s death from heatstroke in 2022.
“They treat us like numbers,” Rodriguez told the press, “We’re the ones who make this company these billions of dollars…the least they could do is actually make sure that we’re going home safe at the end of the day.”
This has been a PR nightmare for Amazon for years now. A tweet from a Chicago union went viral in 2019 as workers went public about the poor conditions in their warehouse:
Amazon’s not the only company that loves its robots. We spend a lot of money on information technology (rising nearly 40 percent in the last decade alone), not to mention the high costs of continually training employees to learn all these new tools and programs and updates. So much time and energy and money spent on machines and computers while ignoring the needs of workers, our most valuable assets, and all this tech might not actually be adding up to much. A recent MIT study found that the current mad dash for artificial intelligence will result in a trillion dollars in spending on upgrading data centres but only helping or replacing a mere 5% of workers. “A lot of money is going to get wasted,” says Professor Daron Acemoglu:
So maybe it’s time to start treating people like things! Time to start spending the same amount of time and energy and money on improving the knowledge and health and energy of our workers with the same focus we do on computers and infrastructure.
Amazon has responded with millions of dollars in worker safety investments in recent years, part of an overall trend – amplified by the pandemic – of recognizing that companies need to care for their employees as diligently as they care for their machines. Mental health has finally become a priority as well. With the state of the world right now, there is no question that employees are bringing their anxieties and concerns into the office, yet we act as if these are not affecting productivity and performance. Despite a noisy backlash against DEI in the US, multiple studies continue to show the direct financial benefits of diversity, equity and inclusion and a recent, fourth McKinsey study on DEI revealed benefits increasing steadily over the past decade. The benefits of AI remain to be seen while the benefits of DEI are proven: better performance, productivity and profits.
A full employee audit from Breakfast Culture and our technology partners at Prompta AI will build as strong a foundation for your workplace culture as an operating system upgrade does for your IT systems. When you have the time, please reach out for an intro call to discuss a path forward for your greatest asset, your people. Schedule a talk with me today to learn more: https://calendly.com/jefferson7/30min.
Let's Break Some Eggs!
– Jefferson Darrell, Founder and CEO, Breakfast Culture™ Inc.
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