![]() ![]() ![]() Barclays defended it as an exercise in ‘assessing office space usage’. The banking giant was investigated by a UK regulator after it came to light that it had in 2017 installed a surveillance software (called OccupEye) beneath employee desks that tracked heat and motion to record how long staff were present at their workstations. The phenomenon of surveillance creep has culminated in many notable PR disasters for well-known brands. requires human judgment) and rather than trying to find a quantifiable proxy, acknowledge the importance of the variable and give it equal weighting in the computation of an employee’s overall performance grade. The trick may be to identify what cannot be measured automatically (i.e. Appropriate usage: Some KPIs naturally lend themselves to quantification (e.g. number of emails written = level of dedication) and/or b) focus on this metric ends up drawing focus away from equally important behaviors that happen to be more difficult to measure. The danger: Creating targets and adding incentives can be powerful, but can also have unintended consequences if a) the metric chosen is a poor one (e.g. billable hours) is an objective measure that can be applied consistently across peers. Analyzing what an employee has actually done (e.g. The aim: Politics, favoritism, and (in the remote age) simple lack of information can lead to unfair evaluations and promotions, and low morale. Appropriate usage: Analyzing GPS data to optimize routes and come up with policies such as ‘no left turns’ ( as UPS did) has little to no effect on the employee experience (except reducing the stress of left turns), and translates to substantial savings in both dollars and minutes. Stifled employees may begin to look for ways to dodge surveillance or, worse still, create the appearance of productive work (machines can sometimes be easier to fool than human managers). “If the average number of bathroom breaks decreases by 0.25 we could make $2.5m additional revenues, so let’s set a target to reduce those breaks”). The danger: Living in a world of productivity metrics, management can begin to think of employees as data on a page or machines in a factory, leading to obtuse and oppressive rules (e.g. Measuring productivity creates the opportunity to identify areas for improvement and determine if improvement measures are effective. The aim: Clearly, productivity directly affects the bottom line of an organization, and also impacts the customer’s experience. Ensuring such actions are justified, minimal, and transparent is key to preventing them from becoming unethical and illegal. Appropriate usage: A case can be made for monitoring specific employee actions such as downloading certain kinds of data and scanning attachments sent externally. Without considering the impact on employees and the potential abuse, maximal surveillance runs the risk of violating regulations concerning employee privacy (see here for an EU perspective). The only way to be absolutely sure no information is being shared by employees is to covertly track all their words - written and spoken - to the maximum possible extent, even in their own homes via their work devices. The danger: Once again the issue is one of “creep”. The aim: In environments where sensitive, non-public information (belonging to 3rd parties, or the firm’s own intellectual property) is handled, firms have a duty to ensure such information is not shared outside the firm. ![]()
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