Are you a digit?

We are facing with tough staff turnover in the recent months. The blooming of the marine industry is non-parallel in history. A sunset industry becomes sun rise. The order books filled up to five years down the road to 2012.

Many of them who have resigned are riding on the economy crest, transiting themselves into the industry as the valuable resources. Anton, one of them who had resigned and left us, shared his personal thought. He reinstated that he wanted to continue to serve us. But the organization did not practice what a modern human resource management should practice. Let me termed it as D&P.

What is D&P? Digit and People. Antonie felt that the organization has been treating people like digit. The fanciful career development, personal grooming, job matching and etc have relegated to hole plugging. Damage control plug. Human is used to plug hole.

I can feel that what he wanted is respect. He wanted a pair, in fact more pairs, of listening ears and a show of compassion in the organization. It is not about modern HR theories and practices. It is about the fundamental cultural values that we as human would like to believe in and would like to subscribe to.

As humankind we should embrace in 3R: Respect the others, Respect yourselves and be Responsible with what you do. If you subscribe to the belief of every individual is a human, you would naturally treat them as people. Or else they are like computer today, 1 or 0, purely digit. In so doing, you do not have to respect them, do not have to respect yourselves, and do not have to take responsibility with what you do. No human touch.

Apparently there are some cultural changes happening in the organization, in fact everywhere. Otherwise we do not have to try so hard to reinstall some of the basic beliefs back to individuals.

The world is connected with broadband nowadays. The digital world makes it more difficult to influence individuals when they subscribe to the belief of riding on economic crest to generate wealth and more wealth.

Human history is a spiral. We are living in the cycle of wealth generation. We loss something that is valuable through the process. It may take us another generation to bring back the values.