New tech could help your boss track you at work

You might be at work, but that hardly means you are working.

Mitesh Bohra thought that projects at his software company, InfoBeans, were taking too long. “Something was supposed to be done in a thousand hours and it would end up taking 1,500,” he said. “We were racking our brains to figure out where the time went.”

Increasingly, bosses have an answer. A new generation of workplace technology is allowing white-collar jobs to be tracked, tweaked and managed in ways that were difficult even a few years ago. Employers of all types - old-line manufacturers, nonprofits, universities, digital startups and retailers - are using an increasingly wide range of tools to monitor workers’ efforts, help them focus, cheer them on and just make sure they show up on time.

The programs foster connections and sometimes increase productivity among employees who are geographically dispersed and often working from home. But as workforce management becomes a factor in offices everywhere, questions are piling up:

• How much can bosses ratchet up intensity?

• How does data, which bestows new powers of vision and understanding, redefine who is valuable?

• And with half of salaried workers saying they work 50 or more hours a week, when does working very hard become working way too much?

story_article_left1

“The massive forces of globalization and technological progress are removing the need for a lot of the previous kind of white-collar workers,” said Andrew McAfee, associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “There’s a lot of competition, global labor pools of pretty good quality, automation to make you more productive and make your job more 24/7. These are not calming forces.”

Indeed, one way employees are pushed to work harder is tethering them to the office outside of normal business hours. Nearly a third of workers in a Gallup poll last year said they were expected to “check email and stay in touch” when they were not working.

“People in sales are continually measured and always know where they stand. Now this is happening in the rest of the white-collar workforce,” said Paul Hamerman, a workplace technology analyst with Forrester Research. “Done properly, it will increase engagement. Done in the wrong way, employees will feel pressured or micromanaged.”

Myrna Arias, a Southern California saleswoman for Intermex, a money-transfer company based in Miami, was required to download an app on her cellphone that tracked her whereabouts 24 hours a day, she claims in a lawsuit now pending in federal court. Arias’ suit quotes her manager as saying, perhaps jokingly, that he knew how fast she was driving at all times.

“Ms. Arias believed it was akin to wearing a felon’s ankle bracelet,” said her lawyer, Gail A. Glick. She deleted the app and was fired. Her suit, which accuses Intermex of invasion of privacy and wrongful termination, seeks $500,000 (about R6,465,487) in lost wages. Neither Intermex nor its lawyers responded to requests for comment.

story_article_right2

Companies making workforce technology that relies more on engagement than enforcement say it increases transparency and fairness.

“In the office of the future,” said Kris Duggan, chief executive of BetterWorks, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2013, “you will always know what you are doing and how fast you are doing it. I couldn’t imagine living in a world where I’m supposed to guess what’s important, a world filled with meetings, messages, conference rooms, and at the end of the day I don’t know if I delivered anything meaningful.”

BetterWorks is focused less on measuring how employees spend their time at the office than in making them more connected to it. One way to do that: Make it feel more like Facebook.

One of its clients, Capco, a financial services consultant, is seeking to make the millennials happy. “They are looking for gigs, not careers,” said Patrick Gormley, the chief operating officer. “The things that would keep them tied to a job in years gone past - a mortgage, a car loan - have evaporated. That really challenges us to create an outstanding employee experience, so we can retain the best.”

Capco’s 3,000 employees, who are spread out geographically, post their most ambitious goals for the year electronically for all colleagues to see and they, as well as executives, can issue “nudges” and “cheers” to each other.

“Transparency is a tough culture change, particularly for management,” Gormley said. “We’re not used to admitting that we’re not perfect.” He noted that 12 people had nudged him electronically, versus 52 cheers.

story_article_left3

Other workforce developers are enhancing the traditional process of evaluating employees, which used to be annual and backward looking. Now it is more spontaneous.

Amazon, the e-commerce giant, uses an internal tool called Anytime Feedback, which allows employees to submit praise or criticism to management. The company says most of the remarks are positive, though some Amazon employees complain that the process can be hidden and harsh.

At InfoBeans, an Indian company whose U.S. headquarters is in the Bay Area, managers feared that workers’ inefficiency would lead to financial losses and client defections. So it began to use a software system called Buddy, which is made by Sapience, an Indian firm that is expanding into the U.S. market.

Khiv Singh, a Sapience vice president, noted that data surrounds us. “We have pedometers to measure how far we walk, apps to monitor our blood pressure, stress level, the calories we’re taking in, the calories we’re burning. But the office is where we spend the majority of time, and we don’t measure our work.”

When InfoBeans first began using Buddy, Bohra was surprised by what he found.

“Engineers would write on their time sheets that they were doing development for eight hours, but we started to see a very different set of activities that people are performing,” Bohra said. “Meetings. Personal time. Uncategorized time. Performing research on something that maybe already should be a part of our knowledge repository.”

Bohra declined to let any of his employees be interviewed. But he said the work was more focused now, which meant smaller teams taking on bigger workloads. Eliminating distractions, including some meetings, lets people go home earlier, he added.

- 2015 New York Times News Service