Unblinking Eyes Track Employees
Workplace Surveillance Sees Good and Bad
A digital Big Brother is coming to work, for better or worse.
Advanced
technological tools are beginning to make it possible to measure and
monitor employees as never before, with the promise of fundamentally
changing how we work — along with raising concerns about privacy and the
specter of unchecked surveillance in the workplace.
Through
these new means, companies have found, for example, that workers are
more productive if they have more social interaction. So a bank’s call
center introduced a shared 15-minute coffee break, and a pharmaceutical
company replaced coffee makers used by a few marketing workers with a
larger cafe area. The result? Increased sales and less turnover.
Yet
the prospect of fine-grained, digital monitoring of workers’ behavior
worries privacy advocates. Companies, they say, have few legal
obligations other than informing employees. “Whether this kind of
monitoring is effective or not, it’s a concern,” said Lee Tien, a senior
staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
When
Jim Sullivan began working as a waiter at a Dallas restaurant a few
years ago, he was being watched — not by the prying eyes of a human
boss, but by intelligent software.
The
digital sentinel, he was told, tracked every waiter, every ticket, and
every dish and drink, looking for patterns that might suggest employee
theft. But that torrent of detailed information, parsed another way,
cast a computer-generated spotlight on the most productive workers.
Mr.
Sullivan’s data shone brightly. And when his employer opened a fourth
restaurant in the Dallas area in 2012, Mr. Sullivan was named the
manager — a winner in the increasingly quantified world of work.
Still,
even people involved in the workplace analytics business say rules
governing privacy are needed, if the emerging industry is to flourish.
Ben
Waber is chief executive of Sociometric Solutions, a start-up that grew
out of his doctoral research at M.I.T.’s Human Dynamics Laboratory,
which conducts research in the new technologies. Sociometric Solutions
advises companies using sensor-rich ID badges worn by employees. These
sociometric badges, equipped with two microphones, a location sensor and an
accelerometer, monitor the communications behavior of individuals —
tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom
for how long.
Sociometric
Solutions is already working with 20 companies in the banking,
technology, pharmaceutical and health care industries, involving
thousands of employees. The workers must opt in to have their data
collected. Mr. Waber’s company signs a contract with each one
guaranteeing that no individual data is given to the employer (only
aggregate statistics) and that no conversations are recorded.
“Privacy policy,” Mr. Waber said, “is going to have to deal with the workplace and not just the consumer issues.”
The
payoff for well-designed workplace monitoring, Mr. Waber said, can be
significant. The underlying theme of human dynamics research is that
people are social learners, so arranging work to increase productive
face-to-face communication yields measurable benefits.
Afterward, call-handling productivity increased more than 10 percent, and turnover declined nearly 70 percent, Mr. Waber said.
Mr.
Waber’s company also provided the data-guided insight to help the
pharmaceutical company increase sales with its new cafe area. At a tech
company, his company found, workers who sat at larger tables in the
cafeteria, thus communicating more, were more productive than workers
who sat at smaller tables.
Bryan
Koop, a commercial office developer who has worked with Sociometric
Solutions, points to the potential for more scientifically designed work
environments. There are current fashions in office design, he said,
that are assumed to increase productivity, like stationing workers at
communal bench-style tables and constructing work cubicles with lower
dividers.
“We
don’t know if those tactics work,” Mr. Koop said. “What we’re starting
to see is the ability to quantitatively measure things instead of just
going by intuition.”
Skeptics
warn of a digital-age rerun of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific
management” from a century ago, whose excesses were satirized in Charlie
Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”
Taylor’s instrument of measurement was the stopwatch, used to time and
monitor a worker’s every movement. His time-and-motion studies
determined the best way to do work.
Initially,
Taylorism was hailed as a progressive force that would free workers
from the whim of autocratic bosses and benefit all. “This is the way
workplace analytics is being presented now,” said Peter Cappelli,
director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania.
But the ideas of Taylorism, he said, were simplified and hardened into a speedup dogma used by bosses, and workers hated it.
Digital
tools for workplace surveillance, according to Lamar Pierce, an
associate professor at Olin Business School at Washington University in
St. Louis, can be simplistically viewed as either good or bad. “The real
challenge for all of us,” he said, “is what is the right level and in
what context is it being done.”
Mr. Pierce was a co-author of a research paper
published last year that examined the effect of the monitoring software
used in restaurants, like the one in Dallas where Mr. Sullivan works,
on employee behavior.
The
researchers studied the data on all transactions and patterns
suggesting theft, before and after the software was installed, at 392
restaurants, in 39 states. The savings from the theft alerts themselves
were modest, at $108 a week per restaurant. More startling, revenue
increased an average of $2,982 a week at each restaurant, about 7
percent, a sizable gain in the low-margin restaurant industry.
Servers,
knowing they were being monitored, pushed customers to have that
dessert or a second beer, which resulted in the increased revenue for
the restaurant and tips for themselves.
The
monitoring software is a product from NCR called Restaurant Guard. The
product, introduced in 2009, exploits the rapid progress in so-called
big data technology, for collecting, storing and analyzing vast amounts
of data. “That’s the big change that makes this possible,” said Jeff
Hughes, general manager for digital insight at NCR.
]The
software is used in several thousand restaurants. But to test the
prototype software in 2008, Mr. Hughes visited his brother Jim Hughes,
who owns a few Bread Winners Cafes, a midprice restaurant in the Dallas
area. The software has steadily improved, he said, so that it now “lets
you see everything that goes on in a restaurant.”
Today,
Mr. Sullivan is the one using software to monitor workers. For example,
he said, the data might show that someone who is efficient at serving
several tables is not very good at sales, if that person’s average
ticket is less than the restaurant’s.
That
server, Mr. Sullivan said, would benefit from advice on how to talk to
customers and suggest featured dishes and drinks. “The data allows me to
go back and coach and train them,” Mr. Sullivan said, “so we can make
more money and so can they.”
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