Stepping Into The Human Workplace

If you look at the business world and the institutional world through the eyes of a little kid or a Martian, or anyone who wasnt raised with our traditional understanding of businesses and institutions, you notice something right away. The first thing you notice is that the business world and the institutional worlds run on a different fuel than normal human life.

They are sustained by and fueled by commands, policies, rules, structures and hierarchies that we dont find in everyday human existence down on the ground. In modern times weve exalted the corporate and institutional systems to nearly the status of religions.

We are adherents to the churches of data and money and organizational power. A lot of people pray to those gods and devote their lives to those religions. The Human Workplace idea is nothing more complex than making work a human place, which it is anyway!

People go to work, and like anything in nature they fight to stay human and plug into their own power sources at work. I sing at a church where the minister said in his sermon one day that the daffodil and lily bulbs in the church garden moved in the dirt ten feet over to poke their shoots out of the soil beyond the concrete patio. Ten feet!

Nature is powerful, and we are part of nature. People naturally bring their best to work unless there are man-made impediments that keep them from doing that. They want to do it. They want to be emotionally invested in their work.

It makes the work more fun and interesting. Work is a communal place. People look for community. It springs up like the daffodils even despite the harshness and grayness of the organizational structure of rules and budgets.

The Human Workplace movement is a global and enlarging conversation about reinventing work for people. As a practical matter, it is easy to build human energy from your own desk or place in the loading dock to other people and from there to larger and larger communities of people who desperately want to be able to be human at work.

Excerpt from:
Stepping Into The Human Workplace