With eighteen years in the field of human resources, it’s tough not to get caught up in jargon. Example: When I was reorganizing my business earlier this year, a marketing consulting and I bounced around using the term “human capital” in some of the new marketing material.

Bzzzzzzz. Wrong answer. Several people reviewing the material said they were insulted by the phrase ‘human capital.’ “It’s a bean counter term!” someone said. “It makes me feel like I’m expendable,” said someone else.

As you can imagine, the term quickly evaporated from the rough drafts of the marketing material.

Since that time, I’ve been curious whenever I see the term. And lo, it caught my eye this past week as I was flipping through the April edition of T+D, the magazine for the American Society for Training and Development.

Kevin Oakes’ piece, Performance Management Lacks Consistency, starts out saying “One of the hottest areas in human capital technology these days is performance management.”

Don’t misunderstand: Oakes’ piece was spot on—effective use of performance appraisals is pretty much a rarity (see my e-book A Strategic View of Hiring and Retaining Good Employees for an easy way to do effective performance reviews).

Still, I wonder if most HR types have gotten too caught up in our own jargon to help the situation any. Reason: I have come to agree that ‘human capital’ is nothing but jargon that insults the average worker. A quick online search confirmed that hypothesis with comments written by employees to their employers:

I do not like the term “human capital”.  It’s a degrading term and should not be used.

Human Capital”? What sort of degrading term is this for us workers? The term itself reeks of “MBA speak.”

I regard “human capital” as a degrading term (i.e., “capital” is a thing, and “human capital” would thus be a human being treated as a thing — a slave).

The perspective seems to be held by more than a few.

What’s your perspective? Is it a valid term, or is it insensitive jargon?

Share This

Filed in Work, Business, Motivation, Management, Teambuilding, Workplace, Corporate Culture