Smartphones and Fitness Trackers Are Being Used To Gauge Employee Performance (newatlas.com) 115
A new system to assess the performance of employees is claimed to be more objective and thus more accurate by utilizing smartphones and fitness trackers. New Atlas reports: The passive system incorporates an app known as PhoneAgent, which was developed by Prof. Andrew Campbell at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College. Using the smartphone's own sensors, that app continuously monitors factors such as the worker's phone usage, physical activity level, geographical location, and the ambient light levels of their environment. PhoneAgent is also Bluetooth-linked to a fitness bracelet worn by the employee, which transmits data including their heart functions, sleep quality, stress levels, and calorie consumption. Additionally, Bluetooth locational beacons in the person's home and workplace monitor how much time they spend at each place, and how often they leave their workstation.
All of the phone, bracelet and beacon data is transmitted to a cloud-based server, where it's processed via machine-learning algorithms that were "trained" on the habits of people already known to be high- or low-level performers. When tested on 750 workers across the U.S. over a one-year period, the system was reportedly able to distinguish between individuals' performance levels (in a variety of industries) with an accuracy of 80 percent. That number should rise as the system is developed further.
All of the phone, bracelet and beacon data is transmitted to a cloud-based server, where it's processed via machine-learning algorithms that were "trained" on the habits of people already known to be high- or low-level performers. When tested on 750 workers across the U.S. over a one-year period, the system was reportedly able to distinguish between individuals' performance levels (in a variety of industries) with an accuracy of 80 percent. That number should rise as the system is developed further.
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Catbert: 'I'm tired of calling the employees "resources." It's too complimentary. I'm thinking of something along the lines of livestock or human capital.
Pointy Haired Boss: 'I don't want them demanding hay.'
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In still other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, the Society of Unamerican Rat Bastards has awarded Prof. Andrew Campbell of Dartmouth College with the prestigious Medal of Dystopia.
In addition to the decorative tinfoil medal, the distinguished professor will receive prize money of $0.15, a five gallon bucket full of steaming hobo shit, seething contempt from all red-blooded Americans, a small Starbucks(tm) latte, and one month free usage of a glory hole in downtown San Francisco.
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Trying to figure out if you have to time out the BM cycles of a bunch of hobos.... Get one hobo that is completely full of it.... Or you collect the feces over time and reheat the collection when time comes to a temperature that is steaming... It really is a fairly complicated prize when you add the "steaming" in there.
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This just in: Lab rats demand equal pay.
You are going to get that app installed how...? (Score:5, Interesting)
>PhoneAgent is also Bluetooth-linked to a fitness bracelet worn by the employee
This article leaves a ton of questions unanswered.
Is the app voluntary, or a condition of being employed?
How exactly are you going to get your employees to wear the bracelet, even when they are not at work?
Are the employees aware of how this data is being used prior to allowing the app to be installed on their phones or wearing the tracker? Sorry, "fitness tracker"?
What is the employee's incentive or reward here?
What company is either running this experiment or forcing it on their employees?
etc. etc. etc....
Re:You are going to get that app installed how...? (Score:5, Insightful)
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My employer had some promotion a while back that encouraged employees to have some tests done (blood pressure, weight, BMI, that sort of thing) and then have the data uploaded to a "confidential" web site where the employee could see it. "Confidential" Haha.
That data is between me and my doctor. As long as I am getting my job done, my employer shouldn't care.
Re:You are going to get that app installed how...? (Score:5, Insightful)
My employer's health insurance comes with a "discount" if I fill out some information in an online form. Well, they call it a discount, but they advertise the price with the discount and it's assumed you'll fill out this information. (Some of it involves saying you'll do tasks and then marking them as done. For example, "I'll get up and walk around 5 times in the next day." There's no checking to see if you actually did this so my wife and I just mark a bunch of stuff as done.)
I could see this being the next step of this intrusive "discount" procedure. Your health insurance costs you $800 a month. Oh, you don't want to wear the fitness tracker bracelet 24/7 and have all the data uploaded to the insurance company? Then you'll lose your $200 a month "Healthy Rewards" discount. You DO want your reward, don't you?
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People are cheaters, and not even good ones. (Score:2)
My employer's health insurance comes with a "discount" if I fill out some information in an online form. Well, they call it a discount, but they advertise the price with the discount and it's assumed you'll fill out this information. (Some of it involves saying you'll do tasks and then marking them as done. For example, "I'll get up and walk around 5 times in the next day." There's no checking to see if you actually did this so my wife and I just mark a bunch of stuff as done.)
I could see this being the next step of this intrusive "discount" procedure. Your health insurance costs you $800 a month. Oh, you don't want to wear the fitness tracker bracelet 24/7 and have all the data uploaded to the insurance company? Then you'll lose your $200 a month "Healthy Rewards" discount. You DO want your reward, don't you?
My previous employer did this, and everyone was running around with their fitness trackers on trying to game the system... giving them to their kids, sitting in meeting shaking them back and forth, etc.. I told them I refused to be tagged and tracked like a coyote. Instead, I used my brain. I loaded up my profile on the healthcare site with tasks, created a fitbit account and linked it to my profile. Then I wrote some automated Selenium scripts that I would run every morning to populate all my stats. I
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Working in healthcare, they REALLY want you to join into the following items:
- Local grocery rewards program
- Tie your personal physical activity tracking ( fitbit, etc.. ) into their data upload portal
Essentially, provide with little incentive, data to partnered firms who data mine, presumably with insurance companies, your profile.
I say your profile, since I have no reason to believe this would be anonymous.
You might save some money with the grocery rewards program, but I'm betting the data sent in, is f
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And a mandatory flu shit yearly, no flu shit, you are fired boy!
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Free work given "smartphone" so that the persons "own" smartphone does not have to get used for work.
That has to be "on" and near a worker when not a work to be contacted on a work related issue 24/7.
The extra "wage" will reflect that added responsibility but the given work smartphone has to be near the worker 24/7.
Re "reward here?"
The extra wage that keeps the work smartphone "ready" 24/7.
Dont have the work smartphone "on" as required
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they kept records of activity levels of the Fitbit step counts
According to my work issued Fitbit I ran around my neighbour's garden most of the afternoon, went for a run down the country lane, chased a rabbit and am now snoozing by the fire.
I guess I'd better ask my neighbour to retrieve it from their spaniel before I next go into the office.
Re:You are going to get that app installed how...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nevermind the other questions of well, I leave my phone on my desk when I'm away. It's an annoyance to me because of recent health concerns that make me want to measure my movements, but it's a hard habit to break.
So I'm always walking out without my phone, because I've done it for years. Heck, I often leave the phone in my bag - I have a perfectly fine desk phone to use and I know I shouldn't be playing with my phone during the day so if I keep it tucked away, it's not going to get used, nor is it likely to get stolen since it's not just sitting on my desk.
Metrics that rely on people being phone addicts don't work when people aren't phone addicts.
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If you are asking these questions, then you should already know the answers.
1. It will be voluntary until enough companies in the given industry adopt it, then it will be mandatory as a condition of continued employment. If you don't like it, sucks to be you. Companies will happily collude to erode your rights so long as they can make or save money doing it.
2. Removal of the bracelet after hours will be considered a breach of your employment contract. After all, you can sign away your rights in a contract.
o.O Wow, what a case of Do Not Want (Score:5, Insightful)
What do they expect when they field this to the typical systems engineer / developer / etc? Or finance people? HR? I can't see the peeps in Accounting showing much in the way of physical exertion.
Oh hell and they want to use this while at home, too? Here's my resignation letter. Right here in this 1 x 1.5" sticky. Yeah. I know it says Fuck Off. That's "I Quit" to you.
This has got to be the most asinine thing I've heard of in a long time. A pox on the first pioneering soul-less MBA that implements anything like this.
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This system should only ever be used on MBAs.
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Please, no. Animals have rights too.
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Only ever used on CEO's.
Overpaid frat drunks who add no value and use their companies as ATM machines
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Enthusiastic about work with an actual work ethic.
Study the people who want to work before accepting them as workers.
Low academic results? Poor past record of work? Wont/cant study? Needs constant supervision?
Resume and CV don't show actual work history?
Non academic consideration?
Find better quality workers who actually want to work.
Accept good people who can work.
Less need to track workers at work.
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Good luck finding good people who can work” as helpdesk or call center drones.
Not that they don't exist, they do. But they're usually at least twice more expensive than what an employer is willing to pay.
I was hired as a call center drone 12 years ago, I did that for 8 months until I found a better opportunity within the company. And then a better one, and a better one...
Nowadays they just hire the cheapest people they can find, and have an attrition rate of over 200% YoY. The average employee tenure
Study your smartphone (Score:2)
Drive the work smartphone to work/home. Let the work smartphone sit at home. Have it "ready" at work.
Reduce the amount of data any given/mandated/office smartphone can collect on.
The smartphone can see "drive/bike/walk" to "work", been at "work", "sleep" at home hours as part of 24/7 shiftwork.
The set 3 locations every workday. At home when not working/shopping?
Perhaps some device/app that lets the work smartphone stay at "home" while connecting t
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Why don't you just turn the work-phone off, instead of the strange efforts you are going through?
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The idea of a work smartphone is the ability for 24/7 contact. Ready for use for work related voice/message/data/video.
No getting to turn the "work-phone off"/"forgetting" to charge after work.
Thats why the smartphone is always "on" and "near" the worker.
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If it has to be near you 24/7, you cannot leave it at home while you go out. If not, you can turn it off. Unless you're trying to fraudulently claim to be available when you're not. In which case, I guess in addition to the immorality (and potential criminality) of lying in your commercial transactions, it seems like you'll get caught the first time an emergency goes down. Seems better to be upfront about it.
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This hairbrained idea might not be all bad, it could spawn a whole new industry of "phone walkers".
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Become your own VOIP "exchange" passing the calls/data on.
Work can always contact the worker.
But the smartphone never reports the expected daily movements.
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Au contraire, Monsieur. Hairbrained refers to the particular affliction where the hair grows inward instead of outward, eventually filling an entire skull with hair.
Re: A solution Conradâ(TM)s!!! (Score:2)
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"We're concerned about your sleep health. The phone app has been reporting a repeating cycle of 1-2 hours of sleep and then 3-5 minutes of frantic dashing around the house, every night for the last month."
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You haven't met my cats. They do even less exercise than me!
How unethical (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think that any scientist involved in this should be stripped of their titles and get a lifelong ban on working in this field or any other as a scientist again. If this is not gross unethical conduct, then I do not know what is.
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Nope. I just have moral standards and they are not derived from what everybody believes, but by actual thought about matters.
Re: How unethical (Score:1)
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Should that ever happen, I will gladly accept that badge of honor.
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I liked the suggestion about attaching the phone to your cat, or perhaps your Roomba.
Re: How unethical (Score:2)
What's that? There was a bug somewhere that made it look like you slacked off 4 hours more than you did? Oopsie, guess your pay is getting docked 4 hours.
80% accuracy (Score:1)
Differentiating Higher and Lower Job Performers in the Workplace Using Mobile Sensing
https://scholar.google.com/cit... [google.com]
It says: "We present initial results from an ongoing year-long study of N= 554 information workers collected over a period ranging from 2-8.5 months." So this study was o
No news here looks just like a (Score:2)
Just go all the way (Score:3)
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GATTACA 2: Independence Day!!!
Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck that shit (Score:1)
Anywhere I worked I would tell them no fucking way.
and they will have the pay for the phone + plan in (Score:2)
and they will have the pay for the phone + plan in full if they want to do that.
Short-sighted machines (Score:2)
Whose performance will they monitor when all jobs have been replaced by computers?
Welcome to the Machine (Score:2)
I am not a number!
Re:Welcome to the Machine (Score:5, Funny)
Feel better now?
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Let's put it together!
I am not a number, I am a FREE NaN!!!
Some explanations from a perspective. (Score:2)
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BTW as a third world shit hole country, which escaped that labelling by the virtue of hosting some investments of a real estate mogul(!?!) here in Turkey it is forbidden to track workers in the way that was described in TFA due to privacy laws. How in the pinnacle of western democracy some employees can be subjected to such applic
Err, why not just measure employee performance? (Score:1)
Why bother measuring a stupid indicator like this when every business worth its salt already measures performance directly?
Fuck off (Score:1)
This is why I quit working for the man (Score:2, Interesting)
This is why I quit my $175K/year engineering job and started a lawn care business. I just got sick and tired of being treated like cattle, even as an alleged "high performer" in Block 1 or 2 most years and with a dozen more junior engineers reporting to me.
After about a year cutting grass and weed eating I expanded into light construction (decks, patios, and storage buildings) and now I'm making more than I ever did as an engineer. Everyone loves storage buildings. We build about five of them every week.
Eve
Computerized Neo-Taylorism (Score:2)
The business world's love affair with Taylorism never really ended...presenteeism is just one aspect of it.
Could it be designed any worse? (Score:2)
I'm reading the article shaking my head, saying no, no, no
Then I hit the part about storing it on the friggen cloud - gotta be kidding.
They could just post it all to the company Farce Book.
A better idea (Score:2)
I have a better idea. Instead of my employer monitoring how much I sleep, what I eat, how stressed I feel, and lots of other sensitive and personal data, what if they just monitor the quality of my work?
I'm just saying.
Accuracy leaves much to he desired (Score:3)
The reality is though that the system is super easy to game. You can simply manually report or stick a Fitbit on your dog. With many APIs it's impossible for me to differentiate between manually reported and automatically tracked.
The money is deposited into an HSA so it's actually tax free.
It's not actually possible to do what is claimed in the article unless everyone is using the same exact tracker and everyone wears them 24/7 religiously which no one does.
We actually get higher engagement with my middle aged women cause they tend to be the type to pinch pennies. They also are the ones to blow up our support lines as soon as there is any irregularities.
Personally I use a Garmin watch to track myself. I actually enjoy seeing my hike automatically mapped and displayed for me to see later with elevation, heart rate, pace, and other metrics charted out.
Our software only sees duration, calories, distance, and step count. Having to pull your location data is a huge waste of database CPU and storage so we don't bother. Some people complain about privacy but frankly we don't give a fuck where you are or what you're doing. Furthermore it's HIPPA protected info so even storing it is a liability so why bother?