Have you ever felt like a number?

One of the most powerful observations I have made in my career is watching how organizations write policies designed to produce efficiencies in managing people. And yet, these rules somehow end up producing inefficiencies for everyone.

Let me explain. 

I remember working for a large employer who offered a discounted lunch during our shifts. The discount was a percentage of the retail price of the lunch item and applied universally across all employees. One employee consumed more than one lunch per shift because of the length of their shifts and the nature of their work. When management observed that this one employee was taking advantage of the benefit at three times the rate of others and how this might affect their bottom line, they decided to create a policy clearly stating the percentage rate discount, as well as a frequency of one discounted meal per shift. 

After the policy was shared with staff, the employee who was consuming three lunches per shift resigned a week later. Why? It turned out that this person could only afford to feed himself if he had access to the employee discount. (Clearly, the employer was not paying living wages.) His only meals of the day were consumed at work and were now reduced from three to one. This worker could not keep up the physically active position on so little fuel and had to seek other employment with a food benefit that would sustain his well-being. He was also the best worker on the team by far. He was reliable, hard-working and detail oriented. The impact of his departure had several conflating results – we lost our key trainer of new staff, we lost our most reliable shift-filler for absences, and the team lost their role model. 

Management added a policy that had a clear rationale for the organization, but failed to take into account the human context. I can distinctly recall my Director in this workplace saying, “Take the person out of the role in your mind - make decisions based on the role not the person filling it.” This Director was eventually dismissed for having such convictions. The organization eventually folded.

When we create policies in the workplace, we intend to prevent loss and preserve productivity. When we apply these policies universally without exception, the individual context of the worker is lost. Completely.

Have you ever felt like a number?

That’s right. Every time when you have felt like a number, it’s because the organization applied a policy designed to create efficiencies in a human process.

Have you ever been disciplined at work because of something personal you were facing? I don’t mean to say that they punished you for getting a divorce but that you’ve been disciplined for your performance when you were facing a difficult human experience? Me too. This was the time when I felt most like a number and that my value was found in my productivity in that very moment instead of over the course of my history as a worker. I learned recently about an employee who had been with a company for 20 years, had received glowing performance reviews year after year, supported new team members with training and development, and was truly a core resource inside the organization. During the pandemic while she was experiencing difficulties at home and in her health, she slipped at work. And then a formal disciplinary HR process ensued, where the person‘s shortcoming was flagged, reported, recorded, discussed in an HR meeting, and filtered through an additional disciplinary process only to completely crush her - all based on one mistake in 20 years. 

The upshot? A singular policy designed to police performance was applied to a singular situation without any human context to validate whether that was appropriate or not. I bet you can imagine how she felt. Do you know that saying “what have you done for me lately?” That’s right. The loyalty, the long hours, the commitment, the dedication, the support - it didn’t matter because the policy was not designed to include it.

The purpose of these stories is to illustrate that both organization and individual pay a price when policy prevails over people.

My human resources professor in business explained to us students thaat these kinds of policing policies are quite often based on a singular case of one person’s poor choice or breaking of unwritten rules. And so, we write a rule and then apply it, often without asking how effective it is at producing the intended result. 

If you think about it for a minute, you might come up with several examples of how a set of rules just simply didn’t apply to you nor were they valid to your contextual experience. This is the realness. If all humans are unique like a singular snowflake in a winter storm, then how have we ever grown to rely on the application of rules that are universal in nature?

The wild thing is that we do this everywhere. 

And it shows up as a limitation in our lives in every single case.

Clothing. Industrialization introduced the efficiency of mass produced clothing. Bespoke tailoring by measuring your body and making clothes to fit takes time and isn’t necessarily easy to scale. 

Instead, a set of regular sizes, or straight sizes, was developed based on the average body size in the community. It did not address anyone outside of that spectrum and created the need for alternative size designations like petite, plus or big & tall. It also created stigmatization and exclusion for those whose bodies were outside of the standard sizes.

Efficiency was introduced to enable more access to clothing and profitability for the clothing sector. But a huge number of people paid the price for those efficiencies in feeling shame, guilt, and otherness. I’ve experienced this myself as a former plus size. And being a clothes horse, I know that brands really missed out on my annual spend because of a lack of supply to me as a consumer. They paid and I paid for standard sizing efficiency.  

Family Medicine. Working alongside Canadian family physicians, I have learned that efficiencies in health care can have significant advantages – like speedy ER teams who have excellent skills and equipment to produce timely responses. These efficiencies actually serve the patient at the highest level – to save their life. But some patient care models actually produce inefficiencies. Think about it – you have twelve minutes and a limit of one issue in each family doctor appointment. For the doctors, it’s the only model that keeps the bills paid, but requires them to run flat out to keep up. The result? Doctors who are leaving the profession at rapid rates because of burnout. Nursing and support teams who are ready to follow them out for the same reason. And patients who never get access to the wrap-around health care they need because the efficient process itself prevents it. Wait times for tests, waitlists for consults, time limits, remuneration schemes, and surface-dive solutions all produce inefficiencies. We all pay with our most precious resources – our time and our health.

Time and again, I have seen how policies designed to create efficiencies actually create the opposite results simply because they are lacking in human context. And yet, we don’t often examine these results because we spend most of our time leaning into the reasons why we should deploy the policy. And so we lose sight of how people are affected by these policies and how, in turn, this affects their performance. 

Would a manufacturing plant add production efficiencies and not track how these translate to the bottom line? Hard no. Would they do an oil change on a piece of machinery, have it malfunction afterwards, and not ask why and what they can do to prevent this equipment failure? You get it.

Here’s the deal.

There are no shortcuts with human experiences. It requires time and commitment to rewrite policies. It also requires knowing what to change and why in order to produce the intended results.

When we fail to realize this, we’re going to pay somewhere along the process. The question is what we are willing to pay and in what currency. And the answer to that question deeply demonstrates how we think the world should go ‘round.’ What truly matters most to you? 

Organizations are simply groups of people behind the brand – the organization has no life without them. But organizations do have a soul. It’s known more commonly as corporate culture and it goes beyond ‘the way we do things around here.’ An organization’s cultural energy is the culmination of how the people inside it feel about the mission, the work, and themselves. We can remedy a broken spirit or culture by lifting up the humans that curate it. 

After all, organizations and the change they make in the world is not done by the bottom line, it’s done by the front line.