Unblinking Eyes Track Employees - Workplace Surveillance Sees Good and Bad
Unblinking Eyes Track Employees
Workplace Surveillance Sees Good and Bad
By STEVE LOHR JUNE 21, 2014
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.
For example, the company studied workers in Bank of
America call centers and observed that those in tightknit communications groups
were more productive and less likely to quit. To increase social communication,
the shared 15-minute coffee break was introduced to the daily routine.
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.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 22,
2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Unblinking Eyes
Track Employees.
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