The smart office: how to remain human in our high-tech world

The tracking of employee location, fitness and mood is on the rise. How can we ensure new tools such as big data and artificial intelligence are a force for good?

Wherever humans go, we leave little trails of data behind us. There are the digital bits – Facebook profiles, mailing lists, search histories – and there is the treasure trove our bodies can produce. Smart watches can that indicate how stressed you are, and sleep trackers can monitor how much you’re moving at night, to determine whether you’ve had the recommended eight hours’ kip. And, increasingly, we’re seeing wearables move out of the home and into the workplace.

In 2015, BP in North America o employees and their partners, and offered staff money off their health insurance if they met their exercise goals. Other companies, including the Bank of America, Kimberly-Clark, Time Warner and Target are also offering their employees similar trackers.

But workplace wearables are about much more than fitness alone. At a factory in Hangzhou, China, employees have been given that allegedly monitor brainwaves and can detect when employees are feeling angry or depressed. In Amsterdam, with a bracelet that measures emotions through electrodermal activity, using light patterns and colours to indicate when they are in a heightened emotional state. The idea is that if people are more aware of their feelings, they are more likely to rethink their decisions and less likely to act recklessly.

But how do we, as humans, feel about all this data gathering? “For a long time, people looked at wearables as if they might be a big brother-type scenario, to do with surveillance within the organisation,” says Chris Brauer, director of innovation at the Institute of Management Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. “But now they’re viewed more as an opportunity to gather evidence to substantiate things that are going on in the workplace.”

There’s also the argument that cold data can provide an unbiased picture of how people are feeling and why they might be acting in a certain way. “If an employee is really stressed, they’re unlikely to report that to their employers for fear that it’ll be seen as a projection of weakness,” says Brauer. “What wearables do is provide evidence-based data that’s accurate and therefore indicative of what’s going on.”

However, there are fears that companies might use wearables to keep tabs on employees. In January, Amazon was granted a patent on a wristband that could pinpoint the location of warehouse employees and buzz if they were about to place an item in the wrong section. The online retailer has also used tracking technology to make sure its warehouse employees don’t fall below a certain level of productivity.