Jamie Gruman, Ph.D., professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Guelph in Canada, discusses some of the ways technology is distancing us from other people and how this can harm employees.
Gruman explains why this era of urgency and efficiency, aided by technological advancements, threatens to further dehumanise and objectify workforces and describes ways this is happening in businesses.
He talks about the research he and Alan Saks, Ph.D., professor of organisational behaviour and human resources management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, have done. That research concludes that work cultures focused on care are necessary for good management and satisfied employees. Gruman also highlights one commonly held “naive belief” preventing the development of more compassionate practices in the workplace.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- Different ways technology can dehumanise and objectify employees at work.
- Why creating a caring work environment should be simple.
- One shared falsehood that stops organisations from implementing caring cultures.
- The role of leadership in demonstrating and rewarding care.
- The interplay between work culture and employees’ relationship with technology.
- How employees are resisting algorithms that threaten their autonomy.
Play the episode below of read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: The future of work is a multifaceted topic. One part of this subject is the deployment of emerging technologies and how those changes will redefine job roles in the future. With that in mind, today’s guest on the FM podcast is here to discuss why the future of work will also be defined by human connection and the ability to care for others.
Welcome back, listeners. I’m Steph Brown. On this episode, I’m speaking with Jamie Gruman, an author, keynote speaker, and professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Guelph. We’ll be discussing Jamie’s and Alan Saks’, Professor of Human Resource Management at University of Toronto, research on the future of work. We’ll be looking at technology’s impact on work cultures, the risk of dehumanisation in an increasingly digital era, and how organisations can help mitigate this risk.
Welcome, Jamie. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Jamie Gruman: Thank you very much for having me.
Brown: One focus of the study was the risk of dehumanisation in an era of emerging technologies. What led you to explore this topic?
Gruman: We have been doing work on care in organisations, and we came across this call for papers looking at the future of work. And so we thought, how will care manifest itself in the future, and what might influence that? We very quickly realised, the continued proliferation of advanced technologies, we think, is going to have a detrimental effect on the already precarious level of care in organisations, so we decided to write about that and submitted it, and it got accepted.
Brown: How could dehumanisation manifest at work for employees?
Gruman: In a lot of different ways. Maybe I should just clarify, first of all, so our paper discusses dehumanisation and objectification, which are very similar things. They’re not identical, but they overlap considerably. Objectification is essentially seeing other people as objects to be used, and dehumanisation, technically, is seeing other people as lacking human attributes. You can see how they overlap. If you see other people as lacking human attributes, you might then think of them as a tool to be used and leveraged in your own work.
The way this would manifest itself at work is when employees are treated as commodities or interchangeable tools, if they’re thought of instrumentally by other people as ways for them to achieve their goals, as opposed to being thought of holistically as human beings with needs and wants and desires and dreams and problems. When you think of people that way, you then disregard their physical and psychological wellbeing.
The trends that we see happening already, the proliferation of technology is really accelerating this, dramatically. We’re seeing things like employees getting fired over email. Whereas in the past, there would have been some compassion, there would have been a discussion. In recent years, I think some of that compassion has waned. These days, people can just get fired without even having a conversation. Here’s your message, “Goodbye; you’re gone.”
We see it in examples of things like ordering something on a delivery app and then the delivery driver has a flat tire or something. People just don’t care. The customers don’t care. They see the person as part of the technological system. What’s happening here is, psychologically, the technology is influencing the way we view other people, and it’s eroding our sense of them as individuals: It’s objectifying them.
Another example is it’s easier to think instrumentally about your online teammate, Helen7863, who works in another country, as opposed to thinking holistically and humanistically about your colleague, Helen who takes her coffee the same way you do, and you see every day. Because the technology is distancing us from other people. In so many ways, it’s creating this culture in organisations where we think of other people more in terms of what they can do for us, as opposed to in terms of who they are. And this is the objectification and dehumanisation.
Some of the reasons this happens is we’re increasingly relying on people analytics and data mining, which shifts our interests from the people to what they work on to what they’re doing during their work hours, like how many emails they send. They’re being defined in terms of their data. The technology that we have that can track people’s health, habits, interactions, and increasingly their emotions: It depersonalises and dehumanises employees and reduces them to objects to be analysed.
The use of AI and robots are trends that, of course, have tremendous advantages, which is why they’re being implemented, and they promote efficiency. But it’s this drive for efficiency that leads us to regard other people in terms of how they can promote our own efficiency and results in dehumanisation.
Brown: Going from this culture of efficiency over connection, what other challenges could employees face in this era of urgency and efficiency?
Gruman: There are many; a lot of them are discussed regularly in the media. Things like increasing skill gaps and the loss of unskilled work as AI and robots take over so much of what used to be low-level unskilled work. What do we do? What do these people do? There’s the problem of digital overload and burnout because the pace of change is so drastic.
We’ve alluded already to compromised relationships. We saw this during COVID when people had Zoom fatigue, and there were a number of discussions of why it was happening. I think one of the main reasons is the reduced physicality. If you’re in a meeting at work, physically, face-to-face with other people, and somebody walks behind you to go to the washroom and you feel the breeze of them walking behind you, maybe you smell their deodorant or their body wash — that physical aspect of work life is disappearing, and that compromises our relationships. And we, again, come to see people more objectively.
There are of course privacy and monitoring issues. I went online just the other day to see how many devices could I find that help employees make it look like their mouse is moving. Because this is something employers are doing now to make sure people are being productive by, not actually measuring the work output, just, are they active? Is their mouse moving? And so, there’s this counter movement to try to trick the employer.
Another problem that technology poses is something that was discussed in my last book, Boost, which is the fact that there’s a reduced work/life balance because we’re now living in an age where your employer can contact you any time of day or night, anywhere you are. And so, there’s this blurring of the boundary between work and home. Most employers only allow this to go one way; they can contact you at home but you can’t then bring your personal life to work. As a result of that, employees are always on and that compromises their ability to recharge their batteries.
There are a whole host of problems that are associated with these new technologies concomitant with the advantages that they bring.
Brown: To minimise the risk of dehumanisation and objectification, the study suggests that employers need to develop organisational cultures focused on care. Tell me more about what a caring organisational culture involves.
Gruman: It’s very simple. Whereas the continued proliferation of these advanced technologies objectifies people and so treats everyone as tools to be leveraged. And there’s no individualisation, there’s no personalisation, there’s no personal touch. Caring is the opposite. The reason caring is a remedy to this problem is because caring is focused specifically on individual needs and the wellbeing of employees. It treats them as individuals. It’s the opposite of what the technology does.
There’s research on the components of care. If we ask ourselves: If we want to be caring, what do we do? It really just boils down to treating people like respected individuals, not tools to be leveraged. Being available for them when they need you, inquiring about how things are going. If somebody arrives late, you don’t just penalise them, you ask them — this is just good management — What’s going on? Is there something I can do? Is there a problem that I can help you resolve? Being attentive and validating their experiences, having empathy, providing support, being compassionate.
As I describe these things, they all just sound very simple, and they are very simple. This is the problem: These very simple basic components of what it means to live well are being eroded by the technology. By building an organisational infrastructure that celebrates care, we can counteract the dehumanising effect of technology and have more thriving, healthier organisations.
Brown: In your mind, what is holding organisations back from creating a caring work environment?
Gruman: Thank you for asking that question. It’s a very interesting one.
When you publish something, the way it works is you submit it, the editor sends it out for review, the reviewers send you back comments, and if they like it, you get to revise it and resubmit it. One of the comments we got from one of the reviewers was, “Your idea that we should build caring organisations is very nice, but it’s a little naïve because that’s not how businesses work. It’s not how the economy works.”
That really set me off. I got to work trying to set the reviewer straight. In my response, my written response to the reviewer, and in fact, in the body of the paper itself, I spent a ton of time outlining the assumptions that underlie classic economics and pointed out that they’re wrong. Classic economics assumes that self-interest explains all human behaviour. All classic economics is based on this idea of self-interest and greed and utility maximisation. And it’s naïve .
If we look at the research on what actually drives human behaviour, that’s certainly a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the only piece of the puzzle. That’s where economics classically goes wrong. It assumes that that’s the only driver of human behaviour. I outlined in the paper why it’s wrong and what the correct way to view things is.
I highlight one of the things that I think is really valuable and convincing to people who hold this view. Adam Smith is regarded as the grandfather of modern economics. In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he says in the opening line of his book and I’ll quote this:
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
Now, in modern everyday language, what that means is we care about other people. And one of the drivers, one of the basic fundamental drivers of human behaviour, one of the pressures on us evolutionarily, over the course of the millions of years of our evolution, is to care for others so that our group thrives. If we bring an antelope home in the past, we share it with other people. We care about their wellbeing because our genes then make it into the next generation.
We are designed to care for others and this is something that is overlooked in modern economics.
What’s holding organisations back from creating caring work environments is this naïve belief that organisations should only be focusing on efficiency and productivity, and the human element doesn’t matter because that’s not how people are designed, that’s not how economies work. Which is based on a faulty understanding of human behaviour and the basis of what makes life worth living.
Brown: That’s really interesting. Thank you for sharing that.
Gruman: My pleasure.
Brown: Specifically, what is the role of leadership in creating a culture of care?
Gruman: This is a good question. It starts at the top. If it’s going to change, it is going to start with leaders. To answer this, I’ll build on the work of Ed[gar] Schein. I discussed this in the paper, too. Schein is one of the main figures in the work on organisational culture, and he suggests that leaders embed cultures in organisations in two general ways: primary mechanisms and secondary mechanisms.
If leaders are simply conscious of the signals they’re sending through their own actions, through the infrastructure they build in the organisation, they can then help to build a culture of care. For example, what they pay attention to and what they measure and control on a regular basis. How they react to critical incidents. If the company is having a difficult time, do they immediately lay people off, or do they look for ways to redeploy them to try to perhaps increase sales? That’s a more caring way to deal with people as opposed to just putting them on unemployment.
Leaders can engage in deliberate role-modelling and teaching and coaching. They should focus on recruiting and selecting and promoting and excommunicating based on a manager’s provision or lack thereof of care. Those are some of the primary mechanisms.
Some of the secondary mechanisms are things like the rites and rituals in the organisations. When you have all-company meetings, celebrate instances of care. Bring up the person who just provided excellent care to an employee or to a customer and give them an award. Design rites and rituals that celebrate these instances of care. Tell stories about care. Have formal statements of care in the missions and values of the organisation.
These are all examples of the way leaders walk the talk of demonstrating and building into the organisation the idea that care actually matters so that people have, as some of their basic assumptions in the organisation, that care is valued here. My leader demonstrates it and they talk about it. And also it becomes part of the toolkit of employees. When they think about situations, they recognise that acting in a caring way is something that is available to them in a way that it wouldn’t be if it wasn’t embedded in the culture of the organisation.
Brown: Thanks, Jamie. What effect do you think caring work cultures, if they became more normalised and embedded in organisations, could have on employees’ relationships with technology in the workplace?
Gruman: It would have positive effects.
One of the new areas of research that’s becoming popular is the way in which employees react against technology. I’ll call it “algo-activism”. Employees have always sought to undermine what they perceive to be unfair practices. If technology is implemented in ways that discipline employees automatically for engaging in practices that the organisation doesn’t sanction and this is done algorithmically. If they’re provided direction and they lose a sense of autonomy. If they are prevented from working in a way that allows them to feel fulfilled as though they’re making a real contribution, as though they’re not just being a tool in the system, they’re going to work to undermine the technology.
They may engage in non-cooperation. They may just refuse to go along with things like gamification of the work system. They may disrupt the technology by blocking data collection or producing an overwhelming amount of data. For example, Uber drivers can turn off driver mode when they’re in certain neighbourhoods, or they stay in residential areas to avoid bar patrons. They can also alter the ratings that are supposed to be provided automatically online. There’s one example I was reading about recently where people entering into contracts with clients, as part of their contract, they would demand high ratings.
All of these algocratic technological measures that we’re putting into place to try to make organisations more effective and efficient can backfire if employees don’t cooperate.
By creating a culture of care, where employees have a say in how the technology is going to be used, where their concerns about the damaging effects of technology are heard and addressed, creates an environment where the employees are going to be less resistant to the technology. And the organisation will be in a better position to accomplish what it wants in the end. Everybody benefits. The organisation gets to have an organisation that’s effective, and employees get to be satisfied and engaged and better employees.
Brown: Thank you for expanding on all those theories. Is there anything on this topic that you think is important to add in to this?
Gruman: The only thing I would say is that we have a choice as individuals, as managers, as leaders. We are not beholden to the trends that seem to be so big. Like just a wave from the ocean hitting the shore, you can’t put your hands up and stop it. But we can. We can change the way technology influences our organisations. We can make conscious decisions about how and when to use the technology effectively.
We need to remember that we are not here to support the economy: The economy is here to support us.
As leaders we can make smart, effective decisions about building healthy organisations at which employees want to work — that can offer us a competitive advantage.
Brown: Thanks so much.
Gruman: My pleasure. Thank you.
Brown: Again, that was Jamie Gruman of the University of Guelph. Thanks to him for his time, and thanks for listening to the FM podcast.
