Your use of language speaks volumes about your organisation

A leading business wants to find ways to make its workforce more loyal, and begins work on an internal initiative which offers a series of promises to its team. Here’s how the initiative is explained to senior members of staff:

‘Across the employee lifecycle our behaviours, process and communications will help talent connect with the employee brand.’

Just take a closer look at that.

What’s this ‘employee lifecycle’? It’s as if employees are some lower life form, perhaps a moth, starting out as an egg (a trainee?), moving on to the larva, passing through the pupa, before eventually becoming an adult (that would be management). Not exactly heartwarming.

And what about ‘helping talent connect with the employee brand’? Talent? Connect with the brand?

Remember, this is about people, emotions and values. It’s about encouraging people to believe that the company they work for is worthwhile. And it talks about people as ‘talent’.

Let’s consider this for a moment. ‘Talent’ describes a person not for who they are, or what they feel, or they effort they put in, but purely by their skills – the things they can do for the company. You might argue there’s something positive about calling people ‘talent’ rather than ‘workers’, but it’s an oddly abstract term, like calling people ‘ability’ or ‘skill’. ‘Helping skill connect with the employee brand’. Put it like that and you can see how weird it is.

What about ‘employees’ – how’s that for a way of talking about human beings? Well it’s certainly familiar, but if you stop and think about it, it defines a person by their employment status – or even their position in the hierarchy. To paraphrase it: ‘You work for us’. Almost sounds like ‘We own you’.

Where’s the sense that we’re talking about human beings with hopes and fears, likes and dislikes, trust and doubts?

If you treat people like this in your language, it doesn’t bode well for how you treat them in your actions. Your words speak volumes about your attitudes. HR and management really need to learn this lesson.

Treat people like units of production and they’ll behave like one. They won’t think for themselves. They won’t take responsibility. They won’t care.

People matter. Units of production, talent, employees, skill, creatures with lifecycles – this is dehumanising language. And you need to treat your people in more human, more humane ways if you’re to hold on to them. Talk about people as people, and you might start getting somewhere.