Dear Valued Resource

We really value you — really!

The other day, I got an email addressed to “Dear Valued Resource.”

You can imagine how valued that made me feel.

The email was sent on behalf of my newest client, a decent-sized company. To manage consultants like me, they use another company, one that bills itself as “an industry leader in contingent and extended workforce management.”

Apparently, being a leader in workforce management does not make you a leader in communicating. That email made no attempt to address me by my name. Or even, say, “Valued Team Member,” “Valued Employee,” or “Valued Consultant.” No. I am simply a resource.

It made me a bit nostalgic for the days before employees were described as resources.

What’s in a name?

I’m old enough to have worked in a personnel office. It was everything you’d imagine it to be, complete with inspirational posters and a constant longing for the weekend. I longed for more than the weekend; I couldn’t wait to get out of there permanently.

Personnel was nothing flashy. It was a necessary but reviled part of any company, born out of the increased distance between employees and management that characterized the Industrial Revolution, when companies became much larger than they’d ever been. That meant that workers were less likely to interact with the people in charge. In the early twentieth century, bad labor conditions were stressing this increasingly distant worker/employer relationship, and personnel departments began emerging to manage the situation. It was never the most-loved part of any company.

Did some personnel genius think that changing the name to Human Resources would help? That seems like such a personnel thing to do!

Maybe they thought a new name would give them more credibility as professionals. Maybe it sounded less bureaucratic — even glamorous. Maybe they thought it would make employees feel more valued. That didn’t exactly pan out. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet — and a personnel office by any other name would smell as sour.

Now, it seems, HR has gone down the same bad-rap rabbit hole as its personnel predecessor. I mean, changing the name doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what these departments do — which, at least these days, is mostly about keeping a company from getting in trouble, generally at the expense of the workers. Employees don’t love HR any more than they loved personnel. Higher-ups don’t tend to love HR either; they tolerate the function because they need it.

But HR professionals keep trying to elevate their status, and that keeps involving name changes.

It can get a bit wacky. Toward the end of my time at Adobe, I attended an all-hands meeting at which the head of Human Resources announced that they were changing the department’s name to People Resources — because “we’re not humans, we’re people!” Wait a minute, you could almost hear her thinking as these words came out of her mouth. What did I just say?

Just a resource

The “Dear Valued Resource” email reminded me of Tom Lehrer’s commentary after he sings his song Alma, which used to crack me up when I listened to it as a kid:

“I know some people feel that marriage as an institution is dying out, but I disagree — and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully not long ago by a letter I received, which said: ‘Darling, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me, or I will kill myself.’ Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope, and saw that it was addressed to Occupant.”

Whoever addressed the email to me was just about as personal. They showed they have no idea who I am, although they have my name and email address. They showed they have no mail merge function that lets them insert my name automatically into an email, or they don’t know how to use it. Mostly, they showed they don’t actually value me.

I wouldn’t expect an anonymous “contingent and extended workforce management” company to value me. It never would have occurred to me to wonder if they valued me. But by addressing me as “Dear Valued Resource,” ironically, they made me wonder — and they made me feel less valued.

It goes beyond not using my name. It’s more about the term “resource” — which is ultimately the problem with the name Human Resources, a fact apparently lost on Adobe’s head of HR. Calling a human being a resource implies we’re just another resource to exploit. Just another thing for a company to use. Just another interchangeable cog in the machine.

Most of us don’t want to be a cog. We want to have meaning and purpose in our work — even, if we can get it, autonomy. Something a “resource” doesn’t have.

I got a chuckle out of the email, but it didn’t inspire much respect for or confidence in the company that sent it. Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with them much, and my actual client is great and clearly appreciates me. But it does make me a bit sad about the state of the work world.

Will companies ever get beyond thinking of employees as mere resources? It doesn’t seem likely in late-stage capitalism. If it does happen, it will take more than renaming HR departments. It will take thinking of employees in an entirely different way. It’s only by thinking of employees differently that companies will learn to address us differently — as the individuals that we are, not just resources.