Hippie CEO Life #41 - Employees Aren't Interchangeable Parts
January 20, 2023
“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person — not just an employee — are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.”
Very early in my career, i came to the understanding that most businesses in the world, especially businesses that were publicly traded, we setup to operate like factories. Our best and brightest business thinkers took everything they learned about optimizing the performance of a factory floor and translated those learnings into optimizing the performance of the office.
This optimization of the office included the theory that employees should be viewed as vital resources, not as humans but as the interchangeable parts that transformed factory work forever.
Why was the invention of interchangeable parts so transformational for the factory?
From Wikipedia: Interchangeable parts are parts that are identical for practical purposes. They are made to specifications that ensure that they are so nearly identical that they will fit into any assembly of the same type. One such part can freely replace another, without any custom fitting, such as filing. This interchangeability allows easy assembly of new devices, and easier repair of existing devices, while minimizing both the time and skill required of the person doing the assembly or repair.
Interchangeable parts created efficiencies, created backups, reduced downtime when a part broke, and reduced maintenance costs overall. So we thought, well it worked with tools and machine parts, why won’t this approach work just as well with human workers?
And so, a term i coined in the early 2000s, the Corporate Clone, was invented. When employees walked through the office doors, they would put on a corporate costume, put away their human uniqueness, and assume the role of an interchangeable part based on their job code.
To help employees adapt to giving up their humanness, we taught leaders to repeat the mantra, “it’s not personal, it’s just business.” as often and as loudly as possible.
But we aren’t parts of a machine, we aren’t interchangeable, we are human. Which means we come with all sorts of flaws and risks and uniqueness and quirks, all things that make us uniquely who we are. When jason breaks down, you can’t just grab another jason off the shelf, reality doesn’t work that way as much as we in the business world have convinced ourselves otherwise.
My drive in building 33 Sticks, is to create a company that allows people to be uniquely who they are, to not feel sick to their stomach every Sunday because it's almost time to put their corporate costume back on again and pretend to be someone they aren't until Friday afternoon. A company that invests in getting the very best out of every employee not by viewing them as replaceable parts of a machine but by investing in each of them individually as truly unique people.
And i will say, that investing not in the employee but in the whole person has created incredible results for the company but more importantly, has created a culture in which our employees no longer have to feel that pain of suppressing who they are every time they walk in the office doors.
In theory, treating employees like machine parts may have looked really great for the bottom line but in practice, it has been a miserable failure that has created devastating consequences for employee’s mental and physical wellbeing.
It’s far beyond time that we change how business gets done.
✌🏼💛
