When Did We Agree to Become Human Resources?

How dehumanising workplace metaphors turn us into assets, cogs, capital and costs.

Anna Katharina Schaffner

This article was originally published on Psychology Today on 29 September 2026.

One of the many things that makes me sad about the modern workplace: we seem to have collectively accepted to use dehumanising language when we talk about humans in organisational structure.

We call ourselves human resources or human capital. We are assets to be sweated. We make up headcount. We are placed in talent pools, moved through pipelines; we get deployed, utilised, optimised, upskilled and restructured. When we cease to be useful, we become dead weight and are severed, fired or made redundant while organisations undertake some judicious rightsizing.

And now everyone talks about human skills. It is not quite in the same category of cannon fodder, and I understand what the phrase is trying to do. In the age of the AI work revolution, where we no longer have an exclusively human workforce, it seeks to identify the capacities that remain distinctively ours. But there is something peculiar about having to put human in front of skills at all. Whose skills did we think they were? And why define ourselves as a species in terms of the relative usefulness of our skill sets in business environments, and, more specifically, the usefulness of our skill sets measured against a technology we ourselves have created?

The kind of dehumanising workplace language to which human skills belongs, however, is not in itself a new phenomenon. It has a much longer history. This history is very telling about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves at work.

Work Metaphors We Live By

 Our language, including the language of work, is riddled with metaphor. Most are so familiar that we no longer even recognise them as figurative language. But metaphors matter. The danger begins when we forget that the metaphor is a metaphor, and start mistaking the world it creates for reality itself. Metaphors are not merely decorative linguistic flourishes. They are culturally sanctioned ways of seeing and thinking, and they substantially shape how we experience the world. Every metaphor invites a specific connection between two different domains, and it thus illuminates certain aspects of reality while making others disappear. The metaphors we use tell their own story about how we see ourselves, other people, and the broader context in which we relate to one another.

Think of an organisation as a machine and people become cogs: efficiency and productivity must be maximised at all costs, friction must be eliminated, glitches fixed. Think of it as a body and there is fat to trim, diseased tissue to remove, and organisational health to restore. A garden gives us dead wood, weeds, cultivation, and growth. Business as warfare brings targets, campaigns, hostile takeovers, and frontlines. We may be OK about inflicting collateral damage and casualties as normalised battle costs.

Researchers studying the language of work have long noted these patterns. Metaphors do much more than simply to describe organisational life: they make certain actions appear natural, necessary, and benign. Horticultural metaphors turn dismissals into healthy pruning; medical metaphors make redundancies therapeutic interventions; military metaphors turn human costs into strategic necessities; mechanistic metaphors make people interchangeable.

All of these metaphors are euphemisms that create distance by dehumanising human actors. Nobody loses the mortgage-paying job they have held for fifteen years. Nobody has to go home and tell their partner that their income has vanished. Nobody experiences shame, fear, anger, or grief. Metaphor becomes a shield against empathy.

Alienated from Ourselves

From a Story Leadership™ perspective, these metaphors reveal the stories beneath the official stories. Organisations are saturated with narratives about what people are, what work is for, what counts as value, and what can legitimately be sacrificed in its pursuit. Some stories appear explicitly in strategies and values statements. Others hide in plain sight in the language we use. I call the capacity to notice and work consciously with these narratives Story Intelligence™.

The really curious thing is that the dehumanising workplace language is not simply imposed upon workers by a sinister managerial class. We all use it. We have long internalised these terms. What is worse, they have a palpable psychological effect on us and structure how we experience ourselves and others in the workplace, and even how we may think of our value as human beings.

We worry about our productivity and our output. We talk about optimising our performance, maximising our potential, increasing our efficiency and upgrading our skillsets. We fear becoming obsolete and redundant, surplus to requirement. We have become extraordinarily fluent in speaking about ourselves in business language terms, assessing our value from an economic utility point of view.

And there is a cost to that. Research on organisational dehumanisation links being treated primarily as an instrument for organisational ends with lower wellbeing, diminished dignity, loss of engagement, and greater intentions to leave.

But I think there is another, subtler consequence. We begin to look at ourselves through the same instrumental lens. Instead of asking How am I? we ask: How am I performing? Instead of What do I need? we ask How can I become more productive? Instead of What matters to me? we wonder What value am I adding? Instead of What kind of life do I want? we think: How can I optimise myself and remain competitive?

This is alienation in a particularly intimate form: we not only learn to experience ourselves as the thing being managed, but we become both manager and resource.

Change the Metaphor, Change the Story

Which brings us back to human skills. As machines perform more tasks once regarded as distinctly human, we have begun to compile lists of our remaining competitive advantages: empathy, creativity, curiosity, judgement, emotional intelligence, Story Intelligence™, moral and ethical reasoning, imagination, and the capacity to relate and form bonds tend to feature.

But notice what we are doing here. Even while trying to define and defend our humanity, we translate it into the language of economic utility. Empathy becomes valuable because AI cannot do it as well. Creativity becomes a competitive differentiator. Curiosity becomes a future-ready capability. Here is the sad irony: Essentially, we defend our humanity by writing a business case for it.

Story Leadership™ begins with attention. What metaphors dominate your thinking and your organisation? Machine, family, ecosystem, team, army, body, marketplace? What do they make visible – and what do they make impossible to see? Most importantly, what do these metaphors do to your people?

Language does not merely describe organisational reality. Repeated often enough, it helps create it. If we want more human workplaces, adding human to our skills, resources, or capital will not be enough. We need to examine the story underneath.

And perhaps we can begin with the strange fact that we ever agreed to call ourselves human resources in the first place.

Images: Steve A. Johnson and Nick Chen @Unsplash