Can Tracking Employees Improve Business?

An anonymous reader writes: The rise of wearable technologies and big-data analytics means companies can track their employees' behavior if they think it will improve the bottom line. Now an MIT Media Lab spinout called Humanyze has raised money to expand its technology pilots with big companies. The startup provides sensor badges and analytics software that tracks how and when employees communicate with customers and each other. Pilots with Bank of America and Deloitte have led to significant business improvements, but workplace privacy is a big concern going forward.

Comments

Surely they meant

[royallthefourth]

Dehumanyze

How about Workplace Moral?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is yet another way to drive it down.

Re:How about Workplace Moral?

[khasim]

TFA claims the opposite. But since they're trying to sell something ... of course they would.

When team members had overlapping lunch breaks and talked to each other, their stress was lower (as measured by tone of voice), job turnover was lower, and they completed their calls faster.

So the bank made a management change and tested it over several months -- it gave half the teams breaks at the same time and compared the results. It found the turnover rate fell from 40 percent to 12 percent, and the more cohesive teams completed their calls 23 percent more quickly -- which is "worth tens of millions of dollars" to Bank of America, Waber says.

Now, to me that that reads more like BoA's PRIMARY communication channels were fucked. So the employees were attempting to share information using the INFORMAL "lunch break" channel.

So BoA, in effect, makes the informal channel MANDATORY.

It isn't about swapping your ham and cheese for Alice's peanut butter and jelly. Or trading "dumbest question this morning".

It's about Alice ... on smoke break with Bob ... learning that X was changed and they weren't told ... and sharing that info with the Chuck at lunch ... who shares it with Danny ...

cost analysis

[gurps_npc]

Almost anything you do can 'improve business'. If only because you are paying attention and trying something.

The question is do the benefits out-way the costs. To that I would say a resounding no.

Partly because people are not robots and employers have a long history of eliminating things that are not directly profitable to the company but are key to the morale and mental health of the employees. Restricting bathroom breaks to 10 minutes, etc. Or doing the opposite - forcing them to attend pointless meetings to set the agenda for next week's pointless meeting.

That is exactly the kind of things that you get when you 'track' your employees.

A better approach is to simply ask - and listen - to the employees about things they consider wasted time. They know more about it than any tracking system.

Re:cost analysis

[pla]

A better approach is to simply ask - and listen - to the employees about things they consider wasted time. They know more about it than any tracking system.

1) People don't typically give honest responses when the CEO asks if they consider his meetings a waste of time.
2) You assume the people wasting others' time actually want to know the truth, rather than using the data they can collect as an excuse to implement whatever new policies they want.

"The data shows that you all become drastically less productive for two hours after our weekly meeting. Clearly, the amount of content I present at those meetings simply overwhelms you all; so to break it up a bit, we will start having slightly shorter daily meetings."

They don't want workers, they want robots

[Fire_Wraith]

Dear gods no.

This is a terrible, terrible idea. You know what you should track? Task completion. If the job gets done, who cares how many bathroom or coffee breaks someone took, or how much time they spent posting on Slashdot? You hired them to do a job, not to own them 8 hours out of the day. Trying to micromanage your employees and turn them into robots is only going to make them utterly miserable, which will make things worse in the long run.

Re:They don't want workers, they want robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Your way of thinking is completely skipping the quality of the item produced. Only in very few industries is the quality unimportant. In the vast majority of industries, quality is a specific factor that increases the sales price of the goods produced, thus generating marked return on investment.

As you may well know, quality decreases as production speed increases.

I have a jar of dollar store candy on my desk. As you can imagine, it is of dollar store quality. I would never pay more than $1 for it. I imagine the factory creating it was run by a manager similar to yourself.

My neighbours desk also has a jar of candy. It cost $10. While I personally am not interested in paying $10 for it, I can certainly tell that it has $9 of quality put into it. I bet that factory is run by someone such as myself.

Both factories make solid amounts of money.

It all depends on if you have a brand and if you give a shit about it. Obviously , the brands at the dollar store don't care about reputation (one wonders why they bother branding the goods in the first place). That's the right place for you to work.

The right place for me to work has a strong brand and is not interested in selling their reputation short.

You can both be right, and in this case, neither of you are morally wrong. It's up to the employee to decide which work environment suits them, and up to the employer to properly pick the right employee for the job. I'd dare say your business would do poorly with a highly skilled individual. Their wasted talent will generate friction.

You put a microphone up where?

[Tablizer]

Whippings also improve business. Ask Roman ship operators.

Preparation for big comeback of slavery in USA

[Anonymous Coward]

All these attempts are nothing else than preparation for comeback of slavery in USA. People in USA are just walking piece of meat with printed numbers on them. Any corporation has more rights than 99% of Americans.
American oligarchs dehumanized and destroyed this country.