IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 8

spectral lines

I

f you work at a company
with 50 or more employees,
chances are you've filled out
an annual employee satisfaction or engagement survey.
You answered questions about
your working conditions,
your bosses, the money you
make, and the benefits you
get, as well as questions that
try to capture your emotional
attachment to the job you do
and the people you work with.
Your responses, whether
made thoughtfully, in haste,
in anger, or indifferently, were
correlated with those of your
fellow workers and statistically analyzed to give your
bosses a snapshot of workplace well-being. The premise
is that happy, satisfied, and
engaged workers are more
productive and efficient.
But what if we could
dispense with the surveys?
What if managerial honchos
could gather that same information directly, not just once a
year but every minute of every
workday-say, from various
kinds of sensors? It may
sound like science fiction, but
it's already here. That's the
concept behind the technology developed and described
by Hitachi researcher Kazuo
Yano, an IEEE Fellow, and
his colleagues in this issue's
"Sensing Happiness."
The idea is that by wearing biometric sensors at
the office-in company
identification badges, for
example-employees and
employers can gain insights
into themselves and the ways
they work together as a team.
8

The sensors measure the
wearer's movements, interactions with others, location,
and voice level. Those measurements then get uploaded
to a central data center, where
they're stored and analyzed.
Much the way embedded
sensors gauge the health of
bridges and buildings, these
wearable sensors offer a finegrained view of what's really
going on in the workplace.
The resulting information
is used to study many aspects
of work and working life,
including the effectiveness of
corporate mergers, the impact
on workers of "happiness
boosting" exercises, and
the effectiveness of office
layouts-do the most fruitful
exchanges occur in the
kitchen or in the conference
room? The sensors can also
help assess workers' daily
patterns of activity and mood
and how they correspond to
peaks in productivity and
focus. And it's not just an
academic exercise: When
people are given the results of
such monitoring, they're able
to improve the way they work
and interact.
MIT researcher Alex
"Sandy" Pentland, a pioneer
and proponent of behavioral
biosensing and what he calls
reality mining, says that
"data mining is about finding
patterns in digital stuff. I'm
more interested specifically in
finding patterns in humans."
It's these patterns that are
being used to evaluate and
change individual and
organizational behavior.

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * DEcEmbEr 2012

Of course, not all of us
relish the prospect of becoming a node in a computergenerated pattern. Data may
be value free, but the algorithms used to analyze them,
and the people who interpret the results, are not. So
a certain amount of trepidation is warranted about who
would control-and own-
the digital profiling of everything about us, including our
habits and personalities.
Pentland has been
outspoken about the need
to study potential problems
and to take the legal steps
necessary to protect us
from digital profiling and
misused databases. First
and foremost, we must
understand what the data
can and cannot tell us. Then
come the other key issues,
the ones related to privacy,
control, ownership, and
rights. When gigabytes of
data exist about you and
your habits, it should be
reasonable for you to ask who
controls it or has access to it.

Pentland's proposed
solution is easy to state and
hard to implement: You
should have the right to
access any and all personal
data, you should be allowed
to control who collects such
data, and finally, you should
be able to control the data
itself. It should be your right
to use it, amend it, or even
destroy it, he insists.
Biometric sensing in the
workplace has the potential to
override the biases and blind
spots that managers invariably
carry with them, and to
provide insights into patterns
and routines they could never
deduce for themselves. But
the best bosses will continue
to follow management guru
Peter Drucker's always
relevant advice: The best way
to find out what's going on
in your workplace is to push
away from your desk, walk
the floor, and see for yourself-
that is, when you're not
wading through terabytes of
employee biosensor data.
-Susan Hassler
spectrum.ieee.org

PhotograPher: Dan Saelinger; StyliSt: Birte von KamPen

The Pursuit of
Corporate Happiness
http://spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum December, 2012
