Or we proffer more pay and expensive perks in an effort to retain our best people, thinking that’s all that matters in a transactional, serious work environment, when what people also want, what they want profoundly, is recognition and a sense that their work is meaningful.
Those incentives, incidentally, are not costly to give. We spend too much money with too little impact because of our flawed intuitions.
But I am also going to suggest a second, deeper problem that knowledge of human psychology won’t fix, because to apply human psychology, you first need to think of those working for you as human. And many bosses don’t—not fully, not consistently.
They, like all of us, dehumanize others.
What do I mean?
Dehumanization involves thinking someone does not have the full range of mental capabilities we associate with people. Sometimes, we view others as being a bit like animals, who are able to feel things just fine but not to think effectively. This happens, for example, when we see laborers as akin to plow horses and are a little surprised when we see them reading. Other times, we view others as being a bit like robots, who can think, at least in a routinized way, but not feel.
No wonder we are such ineffective bosses, misaligned with how people are: we don’t think they are people.
What gets in the way of seeing others as fully human?
Well, of course, classism, sexism, and racism all carry with them a degree of dehumanization, usually of the animalistic sort. Think of the ways people treat women as lesser beings who are to be loved and protected, sort of like superpets, but not as people with agency and the capacity for leadership.
At work, though, there are also triggers that send us down the other path of dehumanization. I will highlight just two.
One trigger is smart technology, or artificial intelligence. In breakout work by Hye-young Kim, who received her PhD from Chicago Booth in June, we have learned that the more we engage with smart technology, the less we see others as fully human. The way this happens is a bit complex, but the simple explanation is that as we increasingly see machines as being similar to people, we begin seeing people as similar to machines. The machines gain capabilities in the comparison, but, interestingly, people lose.
This dehumanization can lead to mistaken expectations of robotic behavior from employees. Think about not only warehouse workers wearing diapers because bosses don’t view them as humans who need bathroom breaks, but also production workers asked to do mind-numbing, impossibly repetitive tasks, or frontline service employees who are expected to be relentlessly cheerful under circumstances in which no human possibly could. (Face it, the customer is not always right, much as we like to say so. In fact, the customer can sometimes be maddeningly rude.)
Asking employees to function as robots in these ways or in these circumstances leads them to fall short and quit or, worse, to snap in ways that hurt our business and then quit.