Bosses tracking their employees digital interactions could be the future of human resource strategies to avoid staff being fired without good reason.

Digital tracking devices, already used by major companies such as UK supermarket Tesco, are being used to track the biometric data of employees by monitoring their conversations and movements.

By doing this employers can support their decisions about their employees' futures with objective data.

University of Sydney's business and information systems Associate Professor Uri Gal said it was a phenomenon that began in the United States and had taken off in the past five to 10 years.

"There's reports out there that say people analytics industry is certainly booming," Associate Professor Gal said.

He explained the aim was to apply "big data principals" into the management of people, so that data gathered about employee's productivity through performance reports, emails, phones and social media activity, would help employers make objective decisions about their staff.

"If you have accurate and objective data on your employees, you'll be able to make rational decisions about them," he said.

Associate Professor Gal said designers of these devices believed intuition was not a reliable source of knowledge and should be removed from the decision-making process.

However, he believes the assumption that data gathering would make decision-making processes objective was not possible.

Associate Professor Gal gave the example of the infinite number of data possibilities an employer could choose from to make an algorithm, such as choosing whether to monitor movements or conversations.

This would make the algorithm dependent on their choices rather than being completely free of intuition.

"Almost always there would be a significant amount of human judgement that goes into designing the algorithms," he said.

Due to financial pressures, Associate Professor Gal said he doubted digital tracking devices would lead to employees leaving their jobs.

"I don't know if most people would quit their jobs is they were asked to do that," he said.