“Human Resources”

Managers often talk about “allocating resources” when discussing project teams. I don’t understand why we are dehumanizing people. Why can’t we just say people/staff/developers? If we are talking about money or hardware, then it’s fine to use the term “resources”. However, the term seems to be embedded in the business culture since the department that deals with people is often known as “Human Resources (HR)”.

I was watching all the Bourne films recently, and in the scenes where you see staff in the agency office who are monitoring security monitors – they say lines like “Asset is on the move”. It probably makes sense here to dehumanise people; because your end goal is to kill them, so calling them “assets” and using terms like “dispose”/”eliminate” probably removes you from the fact that this is a person who has feelings and a family, and you’re about to end them. Maybe managers talk about people in this way so it’s easier when it comes to redundancies. “Cut 10% of the resources, and move on”.

I think it isn’t even that effective to talk about people using their job roles. When managers only look at the Job Titles and not the individual skills, then they end up creating imbalanced teams. This could be that you need to spread a certain skill across teams such as SQL Databases, so a manager who only looks at Job Titles could end up putting the people with SQL skills together.

Additionally, some Seniors aren’t that great, and therefore lower-ranking Developers are better than them. I’ve definitely seen it happen where managers create a team consisting of 3 underperforming seniors, then wonder why it isn’t working. This was a source of my frustration a few years back and was some major motivation to start this blog. 

Creating a team based on 3 underperforming developers is a rarity, but a recent trend for us is to have only 1 Senior leading a few Developers and a Junior. If the Senior isn’t very good, then the team has no guidance at all.

In conclusion, I think managers should show respect to staff and refer to them as people (not “resources”). They should also try to understand where individual people’s skills are, rather than simply making assumptions based on a Job Title. This should lead to better balanced teams. Balanced teams should lead to high performance and morale.