Have we taken following, tracking and monitoring too far? Is it really supporting company growth and productivity? And how are your employees feeling about all this tracking? There can be great benefits to tracking how your company's employees are using their time. Growth-minded employees might also see great benefits if a company can help to identify gaps in skills and help their employees with further career development. Companies can reportedly track everything from the time I wake up and the emails I open to the time I head to the gym and even my health data information. For example, an announcement by Dartmouth noted that: "using smartphones, fitness bracelets and a custom app, researchers have created a mobile-sensing system that judges employee performance. The system works by monitoring the physical, emotional and behavioral well-being of workers to classify high and low performers." Reading our emails and perhaps even listening to our conversations on the phone and in meetings -- all in service to improving our work, our career development and our productivity -- raises the question: How far is too far? How might we track more but do so responsibly? What is responsible tracking?
A recent Wall Street Journal article (paywall) noted: "Advocates of using surveillance technology in the workplace say the insights allow companies to better allocate resources, spot problem employees earlier and suss out high performers. Critics warn that the proliferating tools may not be nuanced enough to result in fair, equitable judgments." As the CEO of a company that works on digital transformation projects with clients ranging from data monitoring to wearable technology and chat applications, these developments are in the forefront of what I do. I believe there is a way to have your cake and eat it too, but it requires openness with your employees. If they don't know what you're tracking and monitoring, it can have repercussions sometime in the future. Think about how you felt or others felt when they learned that Facebook was sharing users' personal data with other companies.
So you ask, what is in it for your employees? How do you make them feel more open and accepting of any new tracking and data collection methods you use? Artificial intelligence may soon become prevalent in the workplace for uses ranging from tracking employee's locations and movements to monitoring moods of teams, using bots that read our mail and even answering our mail before we read it. I believe practices like these are here to stay. For example, according to CNBC, Amazon, Walmart and Microsoft have all been working on a variety of monitoring technologies. And, as an Atlantic article pointed out, "Employee emails contain valuable insights into company morale — and might even serve as an early-warning system for uncovering malfeasance."
Another great example explained in the Atlantic article is Vibe, a program that reports on Slack data to determine "whether a team is feeling disappointed, disapproving, happy, irritated, or stressed." Engaging employees is a critical component to management today, especially when growth-minded talent can so hard to source. Technologies like these can bring tremendous benefits to employees, from understanding about how their communication styles are being perceived to lowering their stress levels by identifying areas where heart rates increase in meetings or voices get raised at the table. So why not be more open about all the ways your companies are tracking or planning to track and collect data? The Wall Street Journal article shared a perfect example of how employees can see benefits from employee dashboards that display their stats: "Earlier this year, Microsoft sales team members received personalized dashboards that show how they spend their time, insights that managers cannot see." The program offers employees suggestions for improvement.
Here are a few tips for how to encourage employee acceptance of this type of tracking:
1. Stop relating it to the world as spying. Open up the dialogue with your staff, make them aware of what you're tracking, and ensure they receive personal benefits by building in dashboards and new opportunities for growth and learning for each employee. A dashboard personalized for me may share where I have skills gaps and offer me ways to develop around those gaps, for example. If you use technology that senses anxiety levels and monitors overload, this may help employees improve their work-life balance and improve their overall engagement.
2. Act responsibly. This type of tracking can go too far. Ensure there is a separation of work and personal life in the data you collect. Many employees are carrying two of everything to work -- and when they travel, they may bring two phones and two laptops. I've heard many individuals say they're feeling forced to separate their lives and protect their personal space; what can you do to ensure there is no breach of that space at your company? Be open about what you're monitoring and offer lunch-and-learns on how best to separate personal and work communications and activities. Providing education and working together can help you begin to reset standards for a new normal. It must be done together, not in isolation with just the executive team.
3. Honor your company values. Is it time to revisit those values? In the age of extreme visibility into everything, it is a good time to explore your company values, including statements of how you will value your employees' data and information.
