How will our lives change as more and more firms digitally monitor their employees' movements and health, at work and beyond. We're about to find out

Alive with data (Image: Jean-Pierre Attal/plainpicture)

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 (see “Sleep hard, play hard“).

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.

“Everyone’s ‘digital exhaust’ is going to be available – it’s just a matter of who can take advantage of it”

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.

However, Ethan Bernstein at Harvard Business School cautions that such devices could also have the opposite impact, due to what he calls the “transparency paradox”. Instead of trying to do the best job, some workers might obsess over hitting their sensor-related targets, making them more likely to cheat and less likely to take potentially useful risks.

Wearables also open up new privacy dilemmas for companies – particularly if they remain on employees after they leave the workplace. US courts have grappled a little with these questions, at least when it comes to more common tracking tools like computer spyware and GPS trackers on company equipment. Several states, including California and Texas, have laws preventing equipment tracking without express consent. But in most places, it’s legal for firms to outfit their employees with wearables, as long as they are clear about what is being tracked and why.

“While the monitoring itself may be permissible, the information that you gather could create unforeseen, unintended consequences,” warns Joseph Lazzarotti, a lawyer at the firm Jackson Lewis in New Jersey.

No escape

For example, a GPS tracker or wearable that travels with an employee outside of work could help paint a detailed picture of that person’s private life, such as whether they spend lots of time in bars. This was also shown in Brauer’s study, which found that the devices recorded enough data to make detailed profiles of individual employees: their lifestyle, exercise and sleep habits.

In the future, bosses could rely on such profiles of their employees to make daily decisions depending on who’s had a good night’s sleep or a sudden burst of productivity, says Brauer. Conversely, people could use their tracker data to put together “biometric CVs” that prove they’re particularly well suited to jobs that take place at odd hours or under stressful conditions.

“People are going to have to decide how much of their lives are accessible and available to their work,” says Brauer. “What we always thought of as a dichotomy between work and ‘life’ instead becomes something like a lifestyle.”

There need to be rules in place to prevent employers from using this technology to the detriment of employees, says bioethicist Arthur Caplan at New York University. One could imagine a future in which bosses choose who to promote and who to fire based on tracking data, or encourage employees to take mild drugs like melatonin or caffeine to boost their workplace performance.

“There must be rules in place to prevent employers from using this to the detriment of workers”

“I think when you have monitoring capability, the obvious question is: where does your job end and your home life begin?” Caplan says.

Sleep hard, play hard If you sleep better, you play better. That’s why some pro basketball teams in the US are now monitoring their players in bed. The first team to implement sleep-tracking was the Dallas Mavericks, who last year made their players wear a wristband-like smart patch called Readiband that monitors body temperature, movement and heart rate. It also gives players a sleep score at the push of a button. The idea is that the data lets team coaches see how sleep affects performance. They can then adjust training regimes or travel arrangements to maximise their players’ sleep quality. Some American football, soccer and ice hockey teams in the US are also using the system.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Off the clock, on the record”