Managing people at work – How did we get here and what does the future hold?

Homo Sapiens are social animals. Since we made the journey out of Africa some 65,000 years ago, humans have realized that banding and working together provides the species a greater chance of survival, growth and flourishing. For thousands of years, human beings operated in small, nomadic tribes that were fairly egalitarian.

However, the settling of human populations into stable agricultural societies and the development of city-states and organized religions brought about a fundamental restructuring of how human beings managed themselves. Social norms became more complex, hierarchies came into place. The idea of kings and leaders became established within human society and empires were built.

But for millennia, the world of work remained relatively stable. People lived and worked within their own communities. Occupational trades were followed across generations. Work was usually gendered. By-and-large an individual had significant control over their own work and its manner of production. Then something changed and it created a seismic shift in the nature of work and its management.

The rise of the ‘industrial man’

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were periods of enormous change, flux, and volatility. Industrialization had begun in many parts of the world. Colonial expansions into developing countries had enabled factories to source large quantities of raw materials and convert them into products using automated machinery. A strong capitalist/entrepreneurial class had emerged. Notions of efficiency of production, factors of production (land, labour and capital) and ideas of scientific principles by which production and distribution could be managed (Frederick Taylor’s idea of the principles of scientific management) had begun to find mainstream acceptance in society.

As more people moved from farming/ agricultural occupations to trade and factory work in industrializing countries, conditions under which people worked in these factories deteriorated. Human beings were considered to be a factor of production, akin to raw materials and machinery. Child employment was rampant and working conditions were terrible.

Violent clashes between workers, who had organized themselves into unions, and their ‘managers’ and employers broke out in the early 20th century. India was no exception to this rise in union labour. The first registered trade union in India, the Madras Labour Union was founded in 1918. Over the next 6-8 years, industrial conflict, and worker strikes, increased exponentially in the country

At the same time, countries like the United States and Great Britain were recovering from the aftermath of World War I. Many of these countries were experiencing a severe deflationary period known as the depression in 1920-21. Unemployment was sky high. Conditions of work had deteriorated further and wages for workers had stagnated. These societies recognized that there was a ‘labour problem’ or issue that needed to be addressed.

Against this background, in 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) was established as part of the Treaty of Versailles. It was set up with the recognition that against a background of exploitation of workers in the industrializing countries at that time, there was a need to establish an organization that focused on fundamental social justice and working rights for everyone.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, industrial relations and the management of labour in factories

Driven therefore by different motives of social justice, broader economic reform, the desire to preserve a capitalist system against the challenges of communism and Marxism and influenced by Taylorism (Scientific Principles of Management), there emerged a group of industrialists, economists and academics who felt that a more collaborative view of the labour-capital relationship was needed.

They felt that the careful application of scientific methods of ‘personnel or labour management’ and workplace reforms focused on safety and offering a fair wage could result in a balance between operational efficiency, profitability, increased productivity, and worker well-being. This first attempt at ‘managing people’ in these industrial workspaces was called Industrial Relations (IR).

Frederick Taylor’s ideas of management, human motivation, efficiency, and the ‘one right way’ of doing things disproportionately influenced ideas of managing people at work. For centuries before Taylor, human beings had developed their skills and knowledge by observing others at work. Informal, apprenticeship-based work was the norm. Even within early industrial work, workers learnt to do their job by observing colleagues, experimenting with their work, and designing work in a manner that suited them. Workers self-regulated the way they worked.

Taylor shifted agency of work from the human being performing the work to a ‘manager’ who would control both the means of production as well as the knowledge involved in that production. He distinguished between two types of work–the planning of the work and the ‘how-to’ that lay with management and the execution of the planned work by labourers.

He stated, “It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with the management alone” (Taylor 1919; page 83). From the work of Taylor and others, ideas of division of labour, management vs labour, control and command mechanisms of organizing, hierarchy of command and the division between blue-collar and whitecollar or knowledge workers became the entrenched management ideas worldwide.

In the beginning, Industrial Relations (IR) departments in corporations were focused on ensuring that factories and corporations worked without strikes and stoppages. A lot of the work was on negotiating with unions, establishing workplace safety standards, ensuring compliance to work standards, worker attendance, and ensuring compliance with labour rules and regulations.

In opposition to Taylorism

In the 1930s, the Human Relations Movement began. This was in response to what social commentators, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists recognized as the de humanization of organizations, workplaces and factories, and the need to stop treating humans as part of the machinery of production.

Social scientists like Mary Parker Follett and Elton Mayo recognized that human beings have social needs. These include the need to be recognized, have a voice and agency over their work, meet and engage with others in the workplace, have some control over the nature of their work, and have informal norms of collaboration and communicating with each other.

The word “Human Relations” was meant to emphasize a return to the notion of labour as a fully thinking, feeling, relational, social person, as opposed to an instrument of production. This movement began to shift the work of IR from purely the management and control of labour into a personnel department that began to think of workplace conditions that fostered more humane practices and methods that could motivate people at work.

The 1950s and 1960s saw a lot of work emerge in the western world around behavioural theories – what motivates human beings in social contexts. Theories of human motivation (such as Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs) as well as leadership ideas around how managers perceived workers (McGregor’s theory X and theory Y) began a movement that is referred to as the behavioural science era today.

Concepts that emerged during this period are prevalent till date. Ideas of two-way communication between management and staff, employee participation in decision making, joint goal setting, notions of team functionality and group dynamics, management by objective settings, performance management and appraisal systems and feedback loops, greater employee participation in organizational decision making – all emerged from the work of behaviour psychologists asking fundamental questions around what motivates human beings at work.

The ‘Human’ in ‘Resources’: its rise and critique

By the 1980s, personnel management as a discipline of study had taken firm roots. Capitalist ideas of profitability, shareholder value, expansion and growth, efficiency of operations, globalization and the rise of multinational corporations had grown worldwide. The term “knowledge workers” began to be used in the context of people doing intellectual work as opposed to manual work.

Increasing competition for profitability and market share meant that there was also competition for human talents and skills. Like land or capital, the skilled human being became a scarce resource. The careful utilization of human knowledge, skills, experience and expertise began to be seen as an integral part of an organization’s strategic success. The use of the term Human Resource Management began to replace the term Personnel Management.

Organizations began to set up HR departments to oversee and manage a range of people related functions and processes. HR departments themselves came to be reorganized into sub-teams. These included recruitment and selection, compensation and salaries, performance and career development, learning and development teams, etc. These catered to different needs of people in workplaces. HR managers now had a say in the organization’s strategy and goal development. HR became an integral functional area within management.

The rise of oligarchies and increasing inequity in societies worldwide, led to the rise of a strand of management thinking and enquiry in the 1990s called Critical Management Studies (CMS). CMS began to offer a range of alternative ideas to mainstream management practices. The motivating concern within CMS was (and continues to be) to critique taken-for-granted management systems that feed into and reproduce social injustices, inequities, and human alienation at work.

Ideas that emerged from such a critique included the questioning of power and its distribution in the workplace. This process brought out ideas of distributed leadership, team leadership, self-managing groups, diversity of thoughts and ideas in the workplace, and servant leadership. The very idea of human beings as resources was questioned.

The growth and development of ideas around managing people in India has echoed mainstream western ideas of people management. Initial forays into people management in India stemmed from the rise of unions and the unionization of textile and mill workers. The first Trade Union Act was established in 1926 to regulate labour issues in pre-independence India.

After independence, the country’s pathway from an agrarian society to an increasingly industrial economy and the rise of the services and IT sector in India have echoed the changing patterns of people management seen in other developed economies.

India too has seen the narrative of people management change from Industrial Relations to Human Resource Management. Many of the tools, frameworks, ideas, and belief systems about how people need to be organized and managed effectively, come from dominant western ideas of capitalist economies.

How can people be ‘managed’ in workplaces?

We now come to the central dilemma in the management of people in workplaces. Year after year, surveys of workplace satisfaction and engagement show dismal results. More and more people are disengaged and unmotivated at work (Gallop, 2023). Studies also show deteriorating mental health conditions at work. The Deloitte Mental Health Survey 2022, indicates that 80 percent of the Indian workforce experience mental health issues and 47 percent of the respondents indicated that workplace related stress was the biggest factor affecting their mental health.

Organizational leaders and social entrepreneurs are not exempt from this stress. The “Business of identity: mental health of entrepreneurs” report, 2020, states, “the mental health of entrepreneurs reflects the symptoms of an unrelenting system, in which failure is personal, and success is measured primarily by the wealth of the enterprise, and not by the aspirations or the joy of the work.”

This is even more evident in the mental health of employees in NGOs. Their scope of work is complex. It also often involves threats to personal safety and job security concerns brought on by funding uncertainties. Therefore, a central question emerges. Is it possible to ‘manage’ a complex human being?

Social, economic and political inequities in the world are also staggeringly high (Oxfam, 2023). A generation of young people are craving greater agency with their work, choosing gig employment and contractual work rather than work full-time with one organization (Fortune, 2023). There is a growing demand that workplaces cannot function as machines, but as living organisms that enable people to flourish.

Organizations have also become sites for political activities. There are now demands seeking that a just society must be modelled within the organization itself. Yet, many of the human/people/organizational processes that are in place are legacy ideas that come from an industrial, capitalist concept of growth at all costs. The workplaces of today need a radical redesign.

Civil society organizations – purpose and people

In this complex scenario, what is the role of the industrial relations/personnel management/human resource management/ people functions team in civil society organizations (CSOs)?

During the early years of India’s independence, CSOs operated primarily as volunteer-driven organizations. Operating as trusts and charitable foundations, they depended on voluntary contributions of time, resources, money and expertise from well-meaning and interested community members. Organizational and governance mechanisms were very fluid and flexible.

Most CSOs then operated within the space of social service. No formal HR functions existed. People participated in the working of these organizations on a predominantly voluntary basis. Formal employment was offered to well-intentioned individuals who were known to the founders or were from the local community.

The early 1960s-1970s flavour of community-led and managed NGOs changed significantly in the 1990s with the sector becoming far more formalized. International donors, large corporate NGOs, NGO networks and mandatory CSR funding have somewhat pushed peoples’ organizations and community led initiatives into the background. Legal requirements of governance and monetary accountabilities have also resulted in NGOs adopting corporate governance structures and strategies.

For NGOs to be seen as legitimate, and attract CSR and philanthropic funding, it has become necessary to adopt the structures, processes and functional departments that are characteristic of commercial enterprises. Formal functional departments like Human Resources have become an integral part of CSO structures.

Adapting HR thinking from the corporate world has meant that typical HR processes are adopted in CSOs too. These include recruitment and selection processes, performance management processes, team management and leadership, compensation and salary structures, training and development functions, etc.

The influence and dissemination of technorational management practices from forprofit into the nonprofit world has created significant tensions about how people need to be managed in CSOs. Civil society organizations’ very purpose of existence is to work toward the elimination of social inequities and inequalities and bring about foundational justice and freedoms in society. CSOs work to empower ordinary citizens and fight against entrenched power coalitions in society. For that work to happen, the internal organizational world of the CSO must “walk the talk.” And many CSOs struggle with this.

It is not uncommon for an NGO to talk about and implement participatory approaches in their intervention programs but be top-down and control-driven inside the organization. Often NGO founders are valourized and placed on pedestals. This creates inequitable power systems within the organization itself. Challenging entrenched ideas of managing an organization becomes difficult when employee voices are not heard or when people refuse to air their concerns.

Mechanistic forms of management, sometimes driven by funder requirements, can often drive the life and energy out of socially purposeful work, making employees feel little more than cogs in the wheel of a nonprofit industrial complex.

The dysfunctionality and dissonances of the internal world of the organization has a significant influence on its external impact as well. For the over three million active NGOs in India today, this is a key issue to address.

To enable CSOs to internally organize themselves humanely and to enable people to flourish within the organization, careful and purposeful organizational design is necessary. The people function has a central role to play in this.

Redefining people function in CSOs

Perhaps a series of questions can help guide this redefinition of the role of the people function in organizations.

1. What are our belief systems around human beings? Do we see humans as fundamentally curious, creative and thoughtful individuals who can be trusted and enjoy work collaboratively? Or do we see people as essentially resources that need to be put to work, cannot be fully trusted, and need to be controlled and led by a leader? Our belief systems will guide our design of the organizations – will it be top-down and centralized or decentralized with self-managing teams or something in the middle!
2. Whose needs are being served by the people function? This is an important focal point, because the people function team can often lose sight of their reason for existence. Are they serving the purpose of the organization through their activities and the manner in which they conduct them? Are they serving the interests of elites within the organization or the interests of people in the field serving communities that are most in need? And how can the competing needs of different stakeholders be considered fairly and equitably?
3. What principles and values anchor the treatment of human beings at work? The design of all people processes in the organization must be anchored on fundamental principles by which human beings will relate to each other. For example, is it principles of fairness or justice or agency and interdependence? The identification of the principles that matter to the organization will determine the nature and flavour of the HR processes that will be constituted in the organization and the role that the human resources function will take on.
4. What kind of ‘society’ do we want represented within the organization? If we seek a society that is fair, egalitarian, diverse, inclusive and just, then it becomes necessary for the organization to represent itself internally as the society that it is working toward. All people processes within the organization must represent those values. Nonadherence to some of these principles creates dissonances in organizations. It leaves people feeling disenchanted, demotivated and disconnected from the broader purpose of their work and with the organization itself.

In conclusion

Today there is a movement toward decentralized, self-managed teams with greater agency and autonomy to design and implement their work collectively and collaboratively (Laloux, 2014). Results have shown that as people have greater agency to structure their work, make decisions and work in a more egalitarian way with each other, accountability, and ownership of work increases (Bushe and Marshak, 2016). People also feel more fulfilled.

The function of human resources has therefore shifted considerably from a people management role to that of an enabler of people flourishing within the organization. This means taking on roles of coaches and mentors and building the capacity of people to lead and manage themselves. The evolution of ideas such as teal organizations, sociocracy, holacracy, and humane organizational designs signal this shift.

This shift in human consciousness and a growing call for creating more equitable societies is an opportunity for CSOs to embrace humans flourishing in their workplaces. Today we have the knowledge, skills, tools, and belief systems to experiment with people practices that are empowering for human beings, sustainable for our planet and create organizations that contribute to the growth of just, equitable and fair societies. It is an opportunity worth grabbing!