Do You Work for a Dehumanizing Corporation?

No one likes to work for work’s sake.  Work is work after all, as opposed to fun and games.  But work can be rewarding, even pleasurable at times, if it is done in the right spirit and with the right attitude and gives more than monetary payoff.  But work cannot be done in the right spirit with the right attitude if the corporation for which you work is constantly minimizing, trivializing, or otherwise dissing your worth as a person.

People are not machines and that is a good thing.  And though work may be hard, tiresome and irksome at times, that is not always a bad thing.  Work is about making, producing, building, and growing things.  And that is what we humans are about.  We want to build, grow, and produce.  We want to add value to our lives.  We want to be valuable to others.  We want to be part of something meaningful.  Corporations that understand this life principle treat their employees very well and have very happy clients and customers.

However, many dehumanizing corporations are solely task-oriented in their approach to reaching their financial goals.  They distribute their goals from the top down, without ever inviting, including, or involving input from their employees in the lower ranks.  Indeed, they tend to treat their lower ranking employees as usable and expendable objects.  Thus, key players in their company may lack ownership as to company quality, may become resistant as to company processes, and worse, may end up having no interest at all as to the company’s overall success.

A robotic, dehumanizing, task-oriented corporation begins with the bottom line and ends with the bottom line, measuring productivity by dollars and profits and evaluates success on the basis of profit margin only.  Everything is about the dollar.  Such an approach to business not only appears reasonable but seems necessary for a company’s success, if not survival.  Nevertheless, it is misdirected.

A people-oriented company, on the other hand, measures its success by the actual value it adds or service it provides to others that require, need or want its product, providing that product to its clients as equitably and reasonably as possible in a way that brings “profit” to all—owner, employee, and client.  It is not that it has no interest in the bottom line or the profit factor; it’s that it puts it in the right perspective.  Its first goal is to meet human needs in a humanizing way, adding to humanity’s overall prosperity in life so that everyone benefits and profits from its product and business.  That is, its reason for being is more than the making of money.

Too many corporations devalue their employees by treating them as cogs in a machine.  The idea is that the more you can make a human like a machine, the more productive he/she will be—if only humans were more like robots.  Companies with this kind of attitude toward their work force tend to dehumanize their employees.  In the short run, it looks as if it works.  In the long run, they lose dollars and profit, productivity slackens, and good employees are wasted.  Bottom line, it is not in the best interest of a company to dehumanize its employees.  What kind of company do you work for?