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

Re:Surely they meant

[Penguinisto]

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.

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.

You put a microphone up where?

[Tablizer]

Whippings also improve business. Ask Roman ship operators.