Indeed, new technologies and the near-universal digitization of work and work-related activities could help businesses keep an eye on, predict, and understand the actions and thoughts of their employees at a large scale. But if these technologies are used in an unethical or illegal way, companies can use them to control and influence workers, which can break trust and put their freedom and morale at risk.
Employees must be in charge, be able to let their employers use their data (or not), and be able to profit from any insights and information that come from it. There is no reason why what is good for the company and the employee should not go together. But there is a lot of temptation to use people's personal information against them or to force them to do things.
Frederick Taylor wrote Scientific Management a century ago, laying the framework for contemporary HR. His key premise was that corporations should transform their offices into real-life psychology laboratories, tracking and monitoring every employee move to increase performance and reduce stress. The paradigm inspired notable businessmen like Henry Ford to create the assembly line and a science-based methodology for enhancing roles, tasks, and job design. Large corporations like Ford Motor Company were utilized to test psychology.
In a century or two, it's all Taylor footnotes. Data scientists from companies like Google and Microsoft are speeding their digital transformation to implement smart technologies around AI and big data to enhance their personnel management systems. The people analytics era was already underway before the epidemic. The number of data available to analyze and forecast employee behavior will continue to rise tremendously, allowing greater chances for management via tech and HR data.
People analytics, in its broadest sense, is the part of human resources that focuses on getting data-based insights about an organization's people – HR's nerdy side. Consider data to be digital records of what workers do, and data analytics to be the science that turns these records into useful information that improves the performance of the company. Most businesses have a lot of information to work with, and case studies to learn from. In the past, people have said that "data is the new oil."
But if you don't know how to use that data, it's just a bunch of 0s and 1. To make sure that data has meaning, HR professionals need the right framework, model, or knowledge, and then you'll need to act on that knowledge to build data-driven business decisions, changes, and changes in an organization. So, talent analytics is a deliberate and methodical effort to make businesses more evidence-based, talent-centered, and meritocratic. This should make them more productive, as one would expect.
Traditionally, yearly surveys focusing on work satisfaction or engagement have assessed the employee experience. However, the association between engagement and productivity is often modest (less than 20%) and confounded with unimportant characteristics like employee personality. It's also ridiculous to wait a year to assess morale, so why not do it more frequently?
On-going pulse surveys and employee listening tools are becoming more popular and may fast trigger action that benefits both workers and organizations. Employee engagement and employee mood may be tracked in real-time using tools like Glint, CultureAmp, and Peakon. In reaction to the Covid-19 scandal, employee listening has grown in popularity.
In addition to employing employee listening to learn how workers are dealing with new remote working arrangements, changing support requirements, and preferred return dates, Rabobank uses employee listening to measure employee satisfaction. Text analytics on free-text comments (software that decodes words and word frequency into emotional sentiment or other psychological traits) and discussion boards may help companies understand what matters to their employees in a rapidly changing workplace.
If new technologies can be used to keep people safe and keep an eye on their mental and physical well-being is another question that needs to be answered now, as well. After a lockdown, a lot of people are talking about how businesses can keep their places of work safe and make sure that they open back up in a healthy way.
There are more things you can do to help, like check the temperature or get a break from your coworkers. Is there any way new technology is being used to help people at work? There are some new tools that employees can use to keep a close eye on their stress and anxiety levels if they want to.
Chatbots can be used to ask about your feelings and give you advice, like the ones in this video. In the same way, the same information could be used to help people or to manipulate them.
If you know how someone is feeling, how they are physically and psychologically, that information could be used to help them and make them better, but it could also be used to manipulate them and control them, too. When technology lets other people or groups know more about your deeper emotional states, this is true, as well.
Employers could use "track and trace" apps, like those made by Google and Apple in the US, to keep an eye on and improve the mental health of their workers. Academics are also working with wearable start-ups like Oura ring and UCSF to turn biometric data into a Covid-19 risk profile that can be used to find people who are at risk.
To show you how this works, a doctor might check for important signs and take your temperature when you get to work. These controversial measures are becoming more common in big businesses, and it is becoming more difficult to tell which things are digital and which are physical, as the lines between our physical and digital lives start to blur.
Another purpose may be to improve staff performance. This will always be the major goal in most businesses, even when they care about morale and well-being since they relate them to performance. On the other hand, this is where surveillance may get “creepy”. Phones, sensors, Alexa, wearables, and the Internet of Things can track and record our movements, and the options to be offline and off the radar are limited, it may soon become intrusive and Big Brother-like.
For example, some organizations are aiming to roll out more invasive monitoring tools that can grab screenshots and follow people's movements to measure productivity and monitor a remote workforce. PwC was slammed earlier this year for inventing real-world surveillance to watch if workers were away from their laptops.
Others are proposing technologies to track Coronavirus transmission inside workplaces. But what trade-offs will staff have to make when monitoring technology is ramped up to combat the Covid-19 pandemic? How can workers be confident their privacy will be safeguarded and their data won't be utilized for other reasons if such tools are mandated to protect employee health? Employee trust, corporate responsibility, analytics capabilities, and the ethical implications of any new technology must be addressed to balance the requirements of the employee, manager, and corporation.
There have been big changes in each of the main areas of talent management, with unique tools and technology that are sometimes based on data analysis. To make their businesses better at work, business leaders need to build a culture of trust, respect, and fairness. They also need to follow the strictest ethical and legal rules.
It's not enough to hope that leading organizations will use new technology or people analytics programs that are ethical. You also need to make sure that they are. As with consumer or financial data, companies should write an ethical code for people analytics.
This will help them know what they should and should not do. Firms must be open and honest with workers about how their personal data is used in order to build and keep employee trust in the use of their personal data.
As more and more work and work-related activities become digital, data science can help companies track, predict, and understand the actions and thoughts of employees at a large scale in the long term. But if these technologies are used in an unethical or illegal way, companies can use them to control and influence workers, which can break trust and put their freedom and morale at risk.
Employees must be in charge, be able to let their employers use their data (or not), and be able to profit from any insights and information that come from it. There is no reason why what is good for the company and the employee should not go together. But there is a lot of temptation to use people's personal information against them or to force them to do things.