No, it’s not technology that matter the most!
Over-reliance on technology is sounding the death knell for organisations worldwide
by Sandeep Rajkhowa
A lot has been written about the impact of COVID19 on business lately. We all have been going through a grave situation globally but we will have to endure this phase of our lives with indomitable courage and with twice the energy. Some businesses will vanish while some will flourish as a consequence of the new way of living people are slowly adapting themselves to. For people worldwide, the basic necessities which everyone took for granted have now found place at the top of the list of items of utmost priority. While earlier we thought that healthcare and food will be available for us all the time, these basic commodities have now become the most prized possessions.
However, that doesn’t mean that the world is ending and that the apocalypse has finally arrived. Human grit, will and determination are capable of handling far more intense, unpleasant and excruciating predicaments than what nature has thrown upon us in 2020. Just imagine the horrors our forefathers may have gone through during bubonic plague of the fourteenth century also known as the black death that lasted for seven years resulting in death of almost 200 million people or take for example the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919. The medical facilities then were far more archaic than today, the communication channels were limited, medicines were scarce and medical research was nascent. Even then the human race survived and recuperated. Today’s situation is different. We have the best of facilities and technologies, but we are still struggling to bring the pandemic under control. It is merely a wake-up call of nature for us! Many are calling it an alarm that nature sets to ring every now and then.
In the rat race of becoming the largest, the fastest and the greatest organization, we tend to forget that we are not dealing with machines but with living human beings. This pandemic has taught us to remember this. Our products and services are for humans and these are also designed by the employees. These employees deserve certain loyalty from the organization as much the organisation expects from them.
This current situation should have compelled all the business owners and leaders of the world to treat their human resource as asset, not as liability. However, it is disheartening to witness how businesses have laid-off their employees or have shut down. I am quite intrigued by the way these organizations run. Did poor planning and execution have led to companies disbanding after facing just two months of slump in business? Are these organizations any different to the daily wage earners or the migrant labourers who are finding it hard to feed themselves and their families due to the 60 day lockdown?
Many of these companies have invested heavily on cutting edge technologies and equipments but have forgotten that in crisis it is their employees who will serve them not the technology or the costly tools and equipments. Over reliance on technology and greater investments in technical tools have made people redundant in certain processes of organizations. Whereas these processes have made certain organizations flourish, it has exposed the brutal fundamental shift of these orgnisations from EQ to AI. But all the AI has no use when you cannot afford your employees anymore.
Business houses are made of people; it’s the human capital that drives the growth of an organization. Technology only expedites that growth and serves a helping hand. No organization can provide services and products for the betterment of human lives without imbibing human values into its processes. It is not the organizations or the owners or the stakeholders that is to be blamed, but it is the unnerving and maddening race to become the technological masters and early movers to adopt new things that we forget to take into consideration their concomitants. It is time to pause, look back, recollect, re-analyse and rethink on the strategies and build more sustainable manpower centric business models rather than taking the so perceived uber cool technology centric approach.
We should not forget that whatever services or products our organizations are providing are for the consumption of humans and living beings of this world. It is not for the computers or gadgets but for their users. It is time to start respecting the power of human capital again and let technology only do what it is designed to – help humans.