Employers often put “help employees reach their full potential” as a promise in their policies and job descriptions. Many a job-searcher has seen these exact words and thought that there was an employer who truly appreciated their employees!
Only to be met with a mediocre workplace environment, where employees were seen – and used – as a resource.
The Human resource
All HR professionals know that it is their job to make the human resource more pliable and easier to handle for the employer.
This means that HR professionals go to great lengths in learning what catch phrases and buzzwords work best to reel in new hires, how to write the perfect policy, set forth with a “humanely looking” HR strategy, and have an arsenal of initiatives that are all focused on the human resource.
Unfortunately for employees, a lot of HR professionals also have the tendency to handle the workforce as a human Resource, focusing too much on using tools without properly fitting said tools to their respective recipients.
Back to basics
In order to rid oneself of this habit – to see Humans as a resource – one should go back to basics and start focusing on how humans should be supported and empowered to reach their individual best potential.
The focus of course being the individual’s potential, as Humans – even in a group – always operate on an individual level.
And why invent the wheel, when Maslow has already done so for you?