Workplace metaphors shape how we see people, value and work.

Calling people "resources," "capital" or "dead wood" can distance us from the human consequences of decisions.

We internalise workplace language, learning to judge ourselves by productivity, performance and value.

One of the many things that makes me sad about the modern workplace: we seem to have collectively accepted using dehumanising language when we talk about humans in organisational structure.

We call ourselves human resources or human capital. We are assets to be sweated. We make up headcount. We are placed in talent pools, moved through pipelines; we get deployed, utilised, optimised, upskilled and restructured. When we cease to be useful, we become dead weight and are severed, fired or made redundant while organisations undertake some judicious rightsizing.

And now everyone talks about human skills. It is not quite in the same category of cannon fodder, and I understand what the phrase is trying to do. In the age of the AI work revolution, where we no longer have an exclusively human workforce, it seeks to identify the capacities that remain distinctively ours. But there is something peculiar about having to put human in front of skills at all. Whose skills did we think they were? And why define ourselves as a species in terms of the relative usefulness of our skill sets in business environments, and, more specifically, the usefulness of our skill sets measured against a technology we ourselves have created?

The kind of dehumanising workplace language to which human skills belong, however, is not in itself a new phenomenon. It has a much longer history. This history is very telling about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves at work.

Work Metaphors We Live By

Our language, including the language of work, is riddled with metaphor. Most are so familiar........

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