Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

4 of 87 comments (clear)

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

    Dehumanyze

  2. 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."

  3. 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.