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Showing posts from June, 2023

EX is more than a Fan Club

The closest thing to EX we had were the fans set up to keep us cool in the small furniture shop where I worked during the sweltering Southern summer of 1986. Experience was what we were getting, not an added perk. The closest thing to 'The Employee Experience' we received was an envelope with our week's pay in cash, a bag of Doritos and a six pack of our favorite cheap beer. In fact, it was 30 years later before I recall actually hearing the acronym EX and the term Employee Experience in the context of the environment and associated benefits designed to attract and maintain new hires to an organization. In the design and media world where I existed, I was simply happy to be working. There were at least ten people outside the proverbial door, just waiting for the opportunity to take my position should I fail. The “fans” we have today provide a whole lot more comfort and engagement to the workspace. I wish I could say these basic comforts were universally accessible, but that

Transhuman Resources

"We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better...stronger...faster."[1] And, he was, and so were my friends and I as we ran in slow motion down the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida in the summer of 1973. We were bionically enhanced secret agents in the era of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock [2]. Transhumanism was a cult-like philosophical movement[3] focused on human longevity and enhancement. America On Line (AOL) was another dozen years away, and the World Wide Web was a decade beyond that. The closest thing to the cloud was an IBM mainframe computer hard wired or connected by phone lines to dumb terminals (picture Chromebooks with no capabilities on their own). Software was measured in bytes and kilobytes, not gigabytes, and streaming was what water did as it flowed down a mountainside. Human resources had evolved from basic labor mediation to legal compliance, recruiting, hiring, training and assessing workers. Employees had lif