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Can Tracking Employees Improve Business?

Posted by Soulskill on from the he-hasn't-gotten-out-of-his-chair-for-11-hours-i-think-he-might-be-dead dept.

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.

21 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Surely they meant by royallthefourth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dehumanyze

    1. Re:Surely they meant by wiredlogic · · Score: 2

      You need to read "1984" citizen.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    2. Re:Surely they meant by Penguinisto · · Score: 3

      Dehumanyze

      True indeed.

      On the one hand, they're paying for the employee's time, so as long as the tracking can be removed/ended as the employee leaves, it's within their legal bounds to do so. On the other hand, given that employees can get creative as hell when it comes to slacking off, I don't see how this is going to be very effective.

      It's like when they moved to an open office (as in "you can see everyone's screens") plan at Intel as a pilot "How We Work" program a few years ago. They figured it would increase collegiality, increase productivity, etc etc. Turns out that the area of the building where they ran that pilot was a frigging ghost town, with the assigned occupants hiding somewhere quiet to get some work done. Other alternatives were to come up with sudden justifications for working remotely, and scheduling conference rooms just to go be somewhere quiet for awhile that didn't have as many eyeballs on you and what you were doing. Not even free soda fountains parked right next to the area could lure folks back to their desks.

      I'd worked in a similar type of office later on, and honestly, it kind of sucked. Auditing file shares for pr0n/mp3s/illicit files with HR had to be done in a conference room, the noise levels otherwise were louder than usual (headphones were pretty much required if you wanted to work quietly), and it was kind of odd having my manager sitting 3' away from me all day long in between meetings (on the plus side, I only had to elbow him if I needed something.)

      All that aside, they've been trying to come up with ways to monitor employees for years: timesheets, RFID badges, workstation monitoring (even down to keyloggers on certain sensitive employees' workstations), email/proxy logs, you-name-it. Most have failed to live up to expectations due to cost or ease of circumvention. Short of hiring a human monitor/proctor for each employee (or small group thereof) to watch and record what they do, you're simply not going to get much more productivity out of your employees than you get now - I daresay you'll end up with less because they'll be spending more time trying to circumvent or cheat all the bullshit you've put into place to track them.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  2. How about Workplace Moral? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is yet another way to drive it down.

    1. Re:How about Workplace Moral? by khasim · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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 ...

    2. Re:How about Workplace Moral? by TubeSteak · · Score: 2

      And most importantly, instead of paying its employees more for their 23% improvement in productivity, the company pockets the savings and gives executives bigger bonuses for making the company more profitable.

      That's basically everything wrong with Corporate America for the last ~40 years.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
  3. cost analysis by gurps_npc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    1. Re:cost analysis by pla · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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."

    2. Re:cost analysis by BVis · · Score: 2

      9/10s of the employees are just there to do what they are told and cannot be bothered to provide input on better way to do things.

      Only after the first few times they're asked to provide that input. After having their input completely ignored (or, worse, they're reprimanded for making suggestions that upper management disagrees with), the employees learn that it's a waste of time and effort. Management is going to do whatever the fuck they want to do. The employees are there to make the stockholders money, not be happy or productive. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

      --
      Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
  4. They don't want workers, they want robots by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:They don't want workers, they want robots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  5. Law of unforseen consequences... by mlts · · Score: 2

    The problem is that this employee data, which would be innocuous in the hands of a company, can easily leave the premises. e-Discovery and fishing expeditions are common, and that info can wind up in the hands of someone completely irrelevant.

    Of course, there are always the criminal organizations who would love that info. They find that Joe Ducato is out on a long haul... grab his address, sell the info to a local gang, and they clean his home out. This hasn't been the case yet, but as time progresses and if the economy sours further, it wouldn't be surprising to have your local gangbangers swing deals with overseas organizations to buy dumps of potential victims and when their places will be empty. Right now, crime is relatively low, but that can easily swing up due to economic factors.

    My philosophy is to use the least amount of data needed, and if has to be obtained, it be decentralized (for example, the AD servers are separate from the HID badge locks, which are separate from Exchange, which is separate from the CCTV room). If the data isn't present, it can't be slurped off overseas and sold.

  6. Sadly yes by blue9steel · · Score: 2

    For low paid employees with quantifiable job outcomes this will likely be a net win even though it's horrible and dehumanizing. For knowledge workers and the like it will be a net loss since job outcomes are less quantifiable and more subject to things like employee morale. Of course that won't stop them from deploying it anyways.

  7. You put a microphone up where? by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Whippings also improve business. Ask Roman ship operators.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  8. Fitting by epyT-R · · Score: 2

    Fitting that the company is called 'humanyze'. Kinda like calling the big brother act 'patriot'.

  9. Posing vs. Working by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    A manager's time is typically very limited. They have to deal with technical issues (the domain), office politics, and administrative stuff like budgets, vacation requests, procurement approvals, etc.

    Is it better they spend a slot of time snooping on an employee, or discussing known issues with them face to face?

    And those not familiar with the tasks at hand for a group will judge employees on superficial things typically, meaning the employee will spend more effort on acting and posing for a domain-ignorant monitor.

    Thus, those who do know the details of the job are probably better served with direct old-fashioned communication, and those who don't know are ill-suited to make a good judgement.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  10. When do they add the electric shock collar? by Required+Snark · · Score: 2

    At Wallmart, Target, McDonalds, etc.

    --
    Why is Snark Required?
  11. Preparation for big comeback of slavery in USA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  12. Unforeseen consequences by digitalPhant0m · · Score: 2

    In the eyes of management and the bean counters, you are nothing more than a resource. You are a meat robot getting paid X to do 100% of Y. Simple.

    In reality you happen to be a human that eats, poops, get's sick, has feelings, family etc and realize that nobody is 100% effect.

    Labor will start to comply and do the best they can to track their time; however shortly after this management get's upset and chastises labor for only getting 75-80% of time tracked.

    Shortly after the berating labor miraculously manages to track 100% of their time. The formula for labor becomes 8/Tasks = Time per task.

    Management becomes happy.

    (This scenario has been realized at every position I've been at in the last 10 years). ... I wonder what the management and the bean counters think when their overlords ask for the same thing?

  13. corporal punishment improves productivity too by arit · · Score: 2

    Not everything that improves productivity is worth pursuing ...

  14. History repeating itself by RackinFrackin · · Score: 2

    These people would do well to read up on Taylorism/Scientific Management, and how well it worked 100 years ago before they delve too deeply.