If you claim that human capital is the greatest asset in your organisation, two questions immediately arise:
- Can your claim be tested? and
- What are you doing to safeguard and nurture that “greatest asset” in your business?
Your answers are key to either exposing your claim to be an empty platitude, or a genuine proposition.
To test your claim, judge for yourself, here is a quick Yes/No checklist?
- Workers are only flesh machines which companies fuel and maintain (through pay and benefits) to generate profit. (Y? No?)
- If and when an alternative machine will become available to do more/better/cheaper work than that of my employees I will immediately replace the employees with the machine (Y? No?)
- Instead of investing to grow my staff, I would rather find alternative employees who will do the same job for less money? (Y? No?)
- In hiring staff, my principle consideration is cost. The less I pay the better for my business? (Y? No?)
I won’t score you. The reason: Each of those questions have two “correct” answers. What I will ask you to consider is whether you can answer all of them NO and be able to justify it. If you cannot, then, I am afraid, you clearly fail the test as to whether you consider staff the most valuable asset in your company.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am not opposed to machines, automation, even Artificial Intelligence (AI). I have personally benefitted hugely from these advancements throughout my life, from my twenties when I purchased my first computer, a CP/M operating system powered Osborne — the age before Microsoft’s DOS.
But its not just me. Properly contextualised, most employees also vote for better, more efficient tools. In one of our entities recently, while experimenting with working with a mobile dry clay crusher that we found to be eight times faster and more efficient in producing smooth clay than the two workers in the division, I asked the guys, “Should we buy the machine?” and both answered, “Yes!”
“What about your job?” I ventured testily.
“With the machine,” one of them answered, “we will make a lot more (clay brick) products!” His team-mate nodded approvingly.
Thence, the difference: machines are tools; human beings are mates. You and your work mates can use machines to improve efficiency, cut costs, produce more. Freeing them up from the rote and brawn of raw toil should be a key to stimulate more creative outcomes — team work, diversification, expanded area of play, scale.
Well, what about AI? Soon we will be able to interact nearly fully with AI-powered robots as we do with human beings. They will check our dental organs and treat us. They will sort out red berries from green. They will write code, drive cars, design houses, even read minds and spy on us for governments and corporations. My take? Sure, but that will not make them human – just very close imitators. Human beings have a life and a soul and a spirit that we connect to and relate at a higher level. But, to experience that, we must seek to relate at that level. We must deliberately, consciously distinguish human beings from machines. We must invest in what makes people interdependent — at home, work, church, in weddings, in war, in sorrow….
But what are those things?
In his book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Sawyer writes: “The more I observed creativity in action the more I realized that the most radical breakthroughs—including television, the airplane, e-mail, and even the board game Monopoly—emerged from a collaborative web that can’t be contained within any one company’s walls.”
Collaboration, that is the key. People talking, imagining, criticizing, questioning, changing, experimenting with each others ideas, towards a desired end. If you can succeed in creating an environment where that kind of collaboration happens, then you have it. You value the “people” aspect of work.You consider people the greatest asset in your organisation, and, in time, superior products, a competitive advantage, will emerge.
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
Haron Wachira 