Call Me “Resource” One More Again
When it comes to the bastardization of communication, #corporatespeak has always given me hives. After spending fourteen years at a large, corporate organization, in meetings, you could expect to hear phrases like:
- “From a [insert literally anything here] perspective…” — You mean from your perspective, don’t you?
- “It is what it is.” — No, it isn’t!
- “Ping me later.” — Sure, what’s your IP address?
- “Can we take this offline?” — “Offline?” Like as in how we’re talking right now?
We don’t speak like this at home, so why the hell do we do it at work? But more cringe-worthy for me than any of those phrases, is referring people to as “resources.”
If you’re out with friends, and you said: “You’re my best resources,” one of them’s gonna call you out on it. No one talks like that. If you wanna know how “agile” your company is? Don’t bother rolling out an Agile Maturity Model, or emailing employee surveys. Becoming Agile is about making real changes, and if managers are calling people “resources,” it’s an indicator that not much has changed, and it’s a culture of business-as-usual.
Back in the day, I used to play a game in our overcrowded Sprint Planning meetings. We had around twenty developers in attendance, and every time the project manager (or one of the managers) said “resources,” I’d correct them by saying “people.” It gave my co-workers a chuckle at first, but it was alarming how many times they referred to us “resources.”
If you’ve heard of Modern Agile, you know the first principle states: “Make People Awesome.” Investing in people builds trust, which is one of the foundations of Agile. It costs zero pesos, rupees, yen, euros, or dollars to treat others with respect, only effort. And changing how organizations address people costs minimal effort.
As Emily Webber pointed out in the flowchart she created, it doesn’t take much. Commit to making a simple change. Say “people” when you mean people. Now, if we can only stop people from saying that they’re Agile because they use Jira.