The Terminator: A Workplace Version

It's closer than you think.

I can recall a news story of a good fifteen years back about a group of employees who received word of their lay-off via email. It was not news of a general lay-off, but specific notice to each one of them that their employment was going to end.

It was probably along the lines of Sorry, Thank You, Good-Bye but that was before text-messaging so it may have been a little wordier.

People were shocked. The practice violated an unspoken societal code: when you deliver bad news, you do so in person.

I regard that now as the early stage of a trend in which technology would replace personal contact.

Workplaces had some early flirting with the impersonal when “zero tolerance” policies became popular: a ham-fisted way to justify automatic termination in harassment cases. What may have seemed bold on the surface was actually a way of dodging that old human approach of matching the level of discipline to the offense as well as the person’s work record.

It was a form of institutional cowardice. “It wasn’t my decision. We have a policy.”

But if pointing to an impersonal policy was desirable, you can imagine the attraction of shifting responsibility to a machine.

We’ve entered that realm.

Consider the increasing use of software to determine which job applicants are given interviews. The software becomes a convenient alibi: “We didn’t turn you down. Our highly sophisticated software did.”

It’s a great device for avoiding accountability while saving time, but it’s also a gutless way of handling a process that deserves close attention and individual analysis. I’ve told clients who are faced with massive numbers of applicants that it makes more sense to make a random selection to whittle down the original pool so serious focus can be devoted to the remaining applicants. That’s far better than pretending that a software program can make a fair and meaningful analysis of the very difficult task of determining who should be given a job interview.

HR screening software is one of the more formal ways in which technology can be used to evade personal accountability and contact. Text messages, email, virtual meetings, and remote work arrangements can be justified in multiple ways, but they often are a strategy to provide distance and avoid genuine face-to-face contact.

The old observation that we make our buildings and then our buildings make us comes to mind. We quickly note the great things we can do with technology but we’re less likely to catch what our technology is doing to us.

Declining conversation skills, attention spans, courage, and patience are four areas that deserve a hard look.

Doing so will require a keen eye because technology is both a conduit and a shield; an impersonal device that both connects and separates.

The reason for this seemingly conflicting mission is that we want certain things, such as updates on projects, immediately but we’d prefer that other things, such as potentially unpleasant discussions, involve us rarely or not at all.

It’s bad enough to receive a termination notice via email, but we are a short step away from the point where a computer makes the termination decision and a chatbot delivers the bad news.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. “The Terminator” of the future may be a robotic Human Resources Officer.

And the email will read, “Hasta la vista, baby.”