Can Tracking Employees Improve Business? 87
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.
Surely they meant (Score:5, Insightful)
Dehumanyze
Re: (Score:3)
You need to read "1984" citizen.
Re:Surely they meant (Score:4)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Basically this will lead to two distinct classes of employment, the tracked serfs and the untracked freemen. Freeman will quite simply tell their employers to go jolly well fuck themselves and make a point of inclement violence if any attempt is made to force use of the devices. 'UNIONS', looks like there is a real and urgent need for them after all.
As for the cheeto munching gutless serfs, what is it the exploitative 1% say, "slaves are slaves because they want to be slaves" (freeman of course fought fo
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you hate America?
Cost is not the biggest failure (Score:2)
The failure is in attrition and a lack of competent employees. The culture that remains in these environments are a bunch of back stabbing adolescents that run the company further into the ground. I have left places that turned into this, and know plenty of other people that did the same thing. You can read the horror stories as easily as I can find them, no need to extrapolate further.
One of the biggest issues I hinted at, which is a culture of back stabbing. Management wanting to shit-can someone can
Re: (Score:2)
If you can't trust the employees you hire to perform well...
Then your hiring process sucks, too.
How about Workplace Moral? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is yet another way to drive it down.
Re:How about Workplace Morale? (Score:2)
This is yet another way to drive it down.
They don't care about morale. If you don't have any work options, And keep producing ? Their attitude is screw your morale.
Re: How about Workplace Moral? (Score:1)
What is this "morale" of which you speak? It sounds like an ancient synonym of job satisfaction but I can't seem to remember either anymore.
Re:How about Workplace Moral? (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA claims the opposite. But since they're trying to sell something ... of course they would.
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 ...
Re: (Score:3)
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.
cost analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
A corollary sort of thing happened where I once worked. There had been a major change of upper management, and they "fixed" a bunch of things in the way that executive management sometimes does. A year into it we were asked to provide a memo telling executive management how things had improved, even though things had degraded so much that anyone except out-of-touch executive management couldn't possibly miss it.
When we told them the truth, they replied, "This isn't what we asked for."
Re:cost analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Way better to weigh the costs...
The more enlightened employers also consider morale and mental health, not just as HR tokens, but as actual productivity tools
Re: (Score:2)
Most employers aren't enlightened, any more than most absolute monarchs of old were. Any relationship where one party wields power over the other is always going to become a black comedy. But that's okay; the lesson will be repeated as many times as humanity needs to have it pounded home.
They don't want workers, they want robots (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:1)
Re: (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 i
Re: (Score:1)
Well of course it does. If you want managers to judge the quality of the product they'd have to know something about it and how it's produced. People who know those kinds of thing are far too rare to waste in management positions.
And as any fule kno, management is a skill all of its own. If you can manage a company that mixes sugar with water you can manage one that makes computers (to pull an utterly stupid, far-fetched, and
Re: (Score:1)
A fair return on investment is that they get done what is expected of them and you pay them what they expect based on a mutually agreed upon employment contract. It is unethical and illegal to change the contract later to get a more fair to you outcome by changing the contract because you think that squeezing the stone a little harder can produce blood.
Re: (Score:2)
Unethical? This implies that the company's leadership gives a fuck about ethics past the point at which not having them costs them money, which is pretty much never. Illegal? At least in the USA, most job descriptions are suggestions, and not in any way binding. Your employer can assign you any task they see fit,
Re: (Score:1)
If the job gets done, and you notice your employees are spending more time in the break room chit chatting than at their desk, then you have enough people to weather a huge upswing in business or an emergency. The worst thing I've seen lately is bosses wanting to pinch the pennies my being 100% efficient, only to later realize that demand for employee time is flexible, but employee time is not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with you in principal, but they don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done faster so they can get more jobs done overall in as little time as possible. Reducing labor costs is the name of the game.
The problem with positional tracking is it doesn't tell you why X was in some location. Because he needed to be there to do some job or because he was trying to chat up some woman?
Re: (Score:2)
If your competitor is getting the job done with fewer employees, your business might not survive.
Maybe there's a middle ground between complacency about poor work ethics and counter-productive micro-management.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes (Score:1)
Yes. As soon as Wally gets a hold of the hack that makes it look like he's there all the time. Boom! Instant productivity increase, since the PHB assumes "there"=="productive".
Law of unforseen consequences... (Score:3)
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.
Sadly yes (Score:3)
You put a microphone up where? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whippings also improve business. Ask Roman ship operators.
Fitting (Score:3)
Fitting that the company is called 'humanyze'. Kinda like calling the big brother act 'patriot'.
Posing vs. Working (Score:3)
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.
When do they add the electric shock collar? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Just subtly remind them of the unemployment rate. Same effect but saves the cost of the collar.
Preparation for big comeback of slavery in USA (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.
Re: (Score:2)
Tracking Badges? (Score:1)
I predict that these tracking badges will show that the employees remain at their desk hard at work throughout the workday, while the employees will continue to take breaks, visit others in the cube-farm, and take long lunches.
Re: (Score:2)
Our productivity is falling, monitor employees! (Score:2)
I went through this at one company where software was installed to allow the managers to monitor the Windows desktop of any employee. My manager came running over to remind me that I shouldn't be looking at Amazon on company's time. And then he saw that I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in my hand, which meant I was on my break and could damn well look at Amazon. I told him to bugger off.
This was easily defeated because the company next door had an opened wireless access point. We just browsed
You spent 10.4 minutes in the bathroom (Score:2)
You spent 10.4 minutes in the bathroom this morning.
The staff in your department average 5.6 minutes.
The doors in your office will therefore remain locked until 5:04 today to ensure you make up the time.
Unforeseen consequences (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 manage
corporal punishment improves productivity too (Score:2)
What about ear tags? (Score:2)
Why don't we ask the question, "Does putting RFID ear tags on the employees improve Business?
Looks like the Business will not rest till it turns every fiscal conservative who still believes in the free markets into foaming in the mouth rabid raving lunatic communist.
Betteridge says (Score:2)
no.
Improvements? (Score:2)
> Pilots with Bank of America and Deloitte have led to significant business improvements
Such as? Were they tweaks to processes that further objectify employees? Or did they improve the environment, thus inspiring employees to higher levels of achievement?
Like what? (Score:1)
"Pilots with Bank of America and Deloitte have led to significant business improvements"
I do not believe that anything they found out required this elaborate effort at Big Data. I'm sure employees have recommended every single thing, they just didn't listen because they didn't pay tens of millions and get it out of this magical god of big data technology.
Great Idea (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yeah, but why don't you talk about anywhere outside the CxO suites?
History repeating itself (Score:2)
These people would do well to read up on Taylorism/Scientific Management [wikipedia.org], and how well it worked 100 years ago before they delve too deeply.
Boycott (Score:2)