SOME jobs come with a uniform. For an increasing
number of employees, that uniform will soon include a badge that tracks
everything they do.
Many companies – including BP, eBay and
Buffer – already encourage employees to wear activity trackers like the
Fitbit, often in exchange for discounts on health insurance. Last month,
California-based Misfit, which makes a sleep and fitness monitor called
Shine, announced
that it is teaming up with Coca-Cola as part of the drink-maker's
employee well-being programme. Several professional sports teams even
monitor their athletes' sleep habits.
In cases like these, wearables are designed to boost
the health and general productivity of the employees, sometimes
encouraging them to compete against one another online. That makes
sense: a healthier workforce saves a company money in the long run. But
elsewhere, such wearables are being used to monitor exactly how
employees work.
At the warehouses of UK-based supermarket
chain Tesco, for example, workers wear armbands that track where they
go, ostensibly so they can be sent location-specific tasks. At
Capriotti's Sandwich Shop in Las Vegas, new recruits record their work
with Google Glass for managers to assess later. Virgin Atlantic has
plans to do the same.
"It is amplified intelligence," says Bill
Briggs, chief technology officer at Deloitte consultants in Kansas City,
Missouri. "Sooner or later, the 'digital exhaust' of everything is
going to be available. It's just a matter of who can take advantage of
it within the right ethical bounds," he says.
But does monitoring your employees with wearable
tech actually boost their productivity? There's little research to show
that it does, although Autodesk, a software firm in California, says it
saw a "distinct change" in employees' behaviour after more than 1000
signed up to receive Fitbits. The firm found that more people walked to
work or held meetings while walking.
At a Bank of America call centre in Rhode
Island in 2009, employees wore sensors made by Sociometric Solutions – a
spin-off company of the MIT Media Lab – to figure out how co-workers
interact. Over six weeks, sensors in the badges recorded where employees
went and who they talked to, how the tone of their voice and the
movements of their body changed throughout the day. Drawn together, the
data provided a unique insight into how the call centre worked. It
turned out that workers who were more social were also more productive.
In response, Bank of America changed the office structure to encourage
employees to chat more with one another. Several European banks now
track their employees with the badges.
This year Chris Brauer
of Goldsmiths, University of London, asked employees at London media
agency Mindshare to wear one of three different activity trackers as
they worked: an accelerometer wristband, a portable brainwave monitor or
a posture coach. After a month, productivity had risen by 8.5 per cent
and job satisfaction by 3.5 per cent overall. Most improvement was seen
in employees who wore passive devices that collected data quietly rather
than interrupting with ongoing feedback. "People recognise that
effectively they're on the clock, that they're being tracked, and as a
result they raise their game," says Brauer.
source: newscientist magazine
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