We have this principle at HackerRank to treat people as people and not refer them as resources. This is from an excerpt from email Vivek to the entire company
On that note, I would like to remind everyone of the nomenclature we use in the company. Refer to people as people, not resources. If you want an SE to help you, just say you need an SE, not an SE resource. You never say, “I’m going to have dinner with my resource” or “I’m going home to play with my resources.” People are people. Let’s do a great job of creating an environment where everyone can give their best. If you still need resources, head over here.
Vivek.
We had to reinforce this concept of people are not resources at multiple meetings, company all hands and other forums. Now, this comes naturally to me. Pens, papers, servers and docker containers are all resources. Developers, support team, and office help are all people. We need resources to autoscale and handle our growing scale. We need people to build the resources to handle high scale.
Now, this is something that comes naturally to me at work. I’ve tried taking to the next step to make some changes outside office as well. So far, these are three things I’ve changed so far.
- With the pandemic in place, the number of times I’m ordering food and in other e-commerce sites have increased a lot. Whenever the folks who deliver the food used to call me, earlier I used to refer them as ‘Swiggy’, ‘Zomato’ or ‘Dunzo’. These apps actually show the name of the person who deliver in the app. These days, whenever I speak to them over phone or pick the food from them, I use their actual name.
- Given the number of times I have to pick food and other delivery, the number of times I meet the security at my building have increased a lot. Recently started addressing him with a little more respect that what he is usually used to.
- We recently hired our summer interns (all-remote). All of them have amazing energy and passion. I hope not to just know them as “interns” but get to know them personally well. My framework to working with them is to respect them professionally(shown in the chat below), but with remote-work, I do need to know them personally.
At the end of the day, irrespective of job, experience or role, people are people.