The world is kinder today. It is expected to be at any rate.
Witches burn, children starve, civilians perish in wars, women are raped but
not without protest. There is a strong pretence at civil liberties; an educated
progressiveness that is synonymous with a repugnant horror at inhumanity and
injustice; to that extent we have evolved as a species.
Some beliefs persist nevertheless, unchallenged and
unquestioned.
No one is indispensable! This is the golden one at the
workplace. There isn’t an employee who has not had this unappetizing negation hurled at her or an employer for that matter, who has not flourished it with the swagger of Salman Khan at some time in their respective careers. I would say these infamous words reverberate across board rooms, offices and corridors of
power. No one is special, we are told. One pair of hands is as good as another. An employee’s
absence does not mean a hiccup to her company. Just about anyone can replace her
at any given time. Her personality, her background, her ideas, her strengths,
her convictions are as easily substituted as a pair of pencil cells in a torch.
This is the biggest ever bluff that needs calling.
How come in a world so full of talk about human rights,
there is not a squeak about a good worker’s professional self-respect? Truth be
told, every golden employee at a place of work is indispensable. How very regressive is it to speak of people in
terms of holes that merely needed plugging! A company is the sum total of its
employees and every solid piece in the puzzle adds value to the jigsaw. Take away one
and there is sure to be disturbance to the group dynamics.
The world has long moved beyond the assembly line production
days of initial industrialization. Job opportunities and requirements have
metamorphosed to include a mind boggling skill set; it is no longer about just
a pair of hands. Work involves personal integrity, value judgement, and risk
evaluation, sense of loyalty, creative solution, professional investment, and
willingness to learn and grow in addition to basic and relevant competency.
Surely the range involved here begs the demeaning insistence that one is just as good as another. It even sounds callously inhumane!
People are unique. They bring a very special value to their
work spaces. And companies stand to gain huge returns by acknowledging this
immutable but long denied truth.The reluctance to acknowledge signature contribution has been a convenient mind-set that has saved
employers bother and effort. Imagine what would happen if they were to admit
people were indispensable! How would they dismiss and control in a culture that viewed employees as individuals, needing
sensitive handling. It would involve acknowledging their exclusivity thus
admitting their value to the company. Perhaps business heads are wary of losing
negotiating strength thus.
It is time though! Is it not time leaders began to
care more deeply? It is high time they thought more, applied more and took the trouble to keep pace with an employee’s
growth. This destructive cliché has placed
productivity in a self-fulfilling downward spiral. Bosses refuse to admit
people are indispensable and so crushed does this make the employees feel that
they begin to act dispensable.
In the complex and modern work place that we literally live out our lives in, every single worker stamps the company's growth story in her personal way. People are crucial, central, cardinal.
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