What make businesses humanistic?
“Humanizing of work” sounds like a big word but simply put it’s the belief that
Work should be participate and not industrial.
Sounds like something that shouldn’t be a concern and come naturally. The reality is quite opposite. I often see work becoming more and more mechanized and losing the human touch.
But how does that matter? The humanization of work is something that should be of paramount importance for all organizations since it dictates our work culture and satisfaction. With a plethora of habitual catacombs, it’s something that is very critical but difficult to master.
The humanization of work is critical in increasing quality of work. It’s valuing the employees as ends in themselves and not as means to end and accentuating their overall growth whilst resolving professional tasks.
There are four basic principles that we feel are paramount to achieving the humanization of work:
Principle of Security
There are various uncertainties that employees may harbor when it comes to working for an organization. Humanization of work seeks freedom from anxiety and fear of economic loss in any working environment. It calls for the removal of any trepidations that an employee may hold. To see to this, an organization should dedicate itself to ensuring healthy working conditions for all employees. This encourages them to contribute loftily to company matters. Similarly the company must provide medical insurance for complete family of employees and maybe an emergency fund for every employee in case something goes terribly wrong.
The company should be able to support employees unconditionally when they need it the most. A company should say to its employees — Hey, I got your back!
Principle of Equity
To put it in very simple terms, the humanization of work places an extremely high level of momentousness to equity. It’s all about balancing and distributing the profits and overall gains of an organization amongst all employees, based on every individual’s work input. This acts as an incentive for employees to push harder in the same work environment, and consequently, yield better results. Unfortunately the perceived value of one’s work is often different from the real value. Companies must pay special attention to removing this perception distortion especially at the time of appraisals.
Cognitive Biases make it specifically hard for us to treat to all our employees and colleagues equally. We must take extra care to make sure that we are not looking through a colored lens.
Principle of Individualism
Apart from completing daily goals and objectives, it is of paramount importance that a company contribute to the overall growth and personal development of an employee. Employees should be incentivized to work on improving their skill sets to their fullest competence. This can only be achieved if the work environment is conducive to self-growth and personal development. Companies must make sure employees have personal growth which would in turn lead to better productivity and performance.
In a lot of employee surveys it has been noted that the topmost reason employees choose to stay with a company is for the sake of thier own personal and skill growth.
Principle of democracy
Vesting a greater sense of control and leadership amongst all employees is what is preached by this particular principle in general. The humanization of work dictates us to increase the individuality of employees while sustaining a high degree of institutionalism through democracy. Organizations should establish a work environment that transcends ideological differences, and takes into account every individual on the work force.
Like the average rating of a product is much better indicator of its reliability than any specific review, the voice of the majority is most cases is better than opinion of few.
Conclusion
So here are some basic tips for business owners like yourself to take home and sleep over:
- Network to foster connections. Instead of hierarchical command, company should resemble an interconnected network. It should be an ecosystems of management, independent agents that hold specialized skills and workers who define their own jobs.
- Delegate more responsibility. Ask your employees to handle things their own way and let them take charge. This allows them to develop skills and you or management to be less busy.
- Mentor and enable employees to constantly develop new skills that are needed by the organization and seek new opportunities to create value for their organizations. Teach them to learn to grow by the process of communications, analysis, experimentation, and conclusion.
Remember — Happy Employees are productive employees. Actually 12% more productive.
