WOULD YOU USE AN EMPLOYEE NAME TAG THAT MONITORS LOCATION AND CONVERSATION

A company based in Boston, US, has used technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and transformed it into a badge that hangs clips onto a lanyard – The Sydney Morning Herald reports.


It contains a pair of microphones conducting real-time voice analysis and sensors that track location everywhere - except the bathroom.  
Ben Waber, CEO of employee analytics company Humanyze, predicted: “Within three or four years, every single ID badge is going to have these sensors.

"We are only scratching the surface right now."
He made moves to calm those who were worried about what they said being recorded, saying that it only monitors how they say it.
Furthermore, he added, the boss doesn’t get to look at personal data and it is up to the discretion at of the worker if they wish to participate.
"Those are things we hammer home,” he concluded.
"If you don't give people choice, if you don't aggregate instead of showing individual data, any benefit would be dwarfed by the negative reaction people will have of you coming in with this very sophisticated sensor."

Waber says that one client, who works in financial services, is using them to improve productivity by using the data to find which teams need to communicate and be closer together: “It's using sensors to get information about what's going on in the real world.
"There are very basic questions I can ask of any business that they cannot answer, such as how much does the executive team talk to the engineering team? If you are a retailer, how much should you talk to a customer in a store?”

He gives an example: "A bank has hundreds of retail locations. Some perform really well. Some don't perform as well. The executives want to understand what the high-performing branches do differently. In turns out that in one company, the high-performing branches were very cohesive. The people who work in that branch talk a lot to each other.
"The people in the lowest performing branches almost never talk to each other.”

But when does monitoring staff become too intrusive?
ASOS were criticised earlier in the year over plans to install ‘CCTV’ cameras to monitor staff.
Bosses of the fashion firm claimed the cameras would be used to improve efficiency, but the Union GMB said it was an invasion of privacy showing “very little dignity and respect” to staff at the distribution centre, according to The Standard.