How Much Employee Surveillance Is Too Much?
On accepting an offer of employment, we expect that many of our privacy rights will be relinquished when using company systems. We are told that business email is company property and may be read by management. Web surfing is logged, and excessive non-business usage could be held against you. Company phone and voicemail are also subject to surveillance. This has been the case for decades and should not come as a surprise.
What may be a surprise though is the scale and power of the data collection, analysis, and prediction capabilities that companies are now deploying, that go way beyond traditional workplace monitoring.
A new terrain littered with potential minefields
The conventional way to gauge employee satisfaction with workplace conditions, compensation, benefits, and management, has been a survey, administered periodically by the HR department. While survey data may be informative, it’s giving way to real-time, automated data collection with sensors embedded directly in employee workstations and conference rooms. Machine learning and other AI techniques are used to make inferences about employee behavior and predict future events.
This new direction is known as people analytics and it’s become big business. Vendors are in a gold rush to supply…
