HR lingo

language and the words you use say a lot about a culture, and that we can take steps to change culture through changing those words. – Emily Webber

The above quote is from a short and sweet “Should you call people resources?” post which resonated with me. I don’t remember when the term “resource” applied to people started to bother me. It’s been a while, but usually I didn’t do anything about it. Last year I decided to engage with an HR admin in a bank where I worked as an external consultant. She kept referring to me and my colleagues as “external resources” in emails. I’d asked her to stop calling us that, but either she had ignored my request or thought it wasn’t important and continued to call us “ER”s. I repeated my request accompanied by a small explanation why people are not resources thinking that sensible people especially working in HR would have no problem understanding it. Her reply: “but it is just a classification in our internal IT system”…

Some of my HR friends say that the R-word is slowly disappearing from their industry’s lexicon and that organization adopt Google’s “People Operation” or similar (hopefully not just borrowing the term and being done with it). I like this development.

What about “talent”? It is not as offensive as “resources”, but still might trigger “I’ve got no talents.” Or “I’m not good at this.” And isn’t talent overrated? And what about “human capital” or “human assets”? What is the benefit of using these words and constructs instead of just “people”?