Companies are testing these new techniques to improve worker’s proficiency. They’re testing if workers tend to work more if given exposure to more social interaction. A pharmaceutical company implemented a larger café area instead of coffee makers, and a bank’s call center came up with 15 minutes of coffee break in between work. These techniques resulted in rapid growth of sales within lesser turnover.
But this is a bit different. Privacy advocates are more worried about this new digital monitoring method. Lee Tien, a senior lawyer at Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco said,”Despite of effectiveness of this kind of monitoring system, it’s a concern.” Jim Sullivan, a waiter at Dallas restaurant shares same kind of experience of an intelligent software, which was monitoring him.
The software was called the digital sentinel, which was used to track every dish, drink, waiter, ticket. It was used to look for patterns, which could suggest employee theft. The information provided by software spotlighted most productive waiters. Sullivan’s was on top of the list of productive workers. Sullivan was named manager, when his employer opened his fourth restaurant in Dallas area in 2012. Even experts in workplace analytics business suggest to have rules to govern privacy in order to flourish this newborn industry. Chief executive of an analytics company, Sociometric Solutions, suggests companies to use sensor rich ID badges.
These sensor rich badges by sociometric pack two mics, accelerometer, location sensor. These badges monitor the communication behaviour of individuals on basis of tone of voice, body language, posture, the duration of communication with individual employees. Sociometric has over 20 client companies, involving number of employees. Waber has unique privacy policy at Sociometric. They only give aggregate statistics to employer. Employer has no access to individual employee’s data.
