Chapter 13
Best Buddy or Big Brother?
The final question to ask to become focus-wise in your use of technology is: Does your technology encourage or erode engagement?
If focused attention is a commodity, then focus-wise technology can help determine how your organization's attention resources are being spent. It's neither realistic nor desirable for employees to focus on work 100 percent of the time. We all need the relief of a cat video (or its equivalent) once in a while.
But what if your employees wasted hours every week watching and sharing a feline-palooza of videos?
Today's technology can virtually tell you anything you want to know about employee behavior. Anything. The question is no longer what can you know? It's what should you know to get the best performance at the lowest attention and financial cost? And that is not a simple question.
A rising number of companies are using productivity-monitoring software to watch employees and see exactly how they spend their time. The roughly $200 million monitoring industry is expected to grow to $500 million by 2020.1
George Orwell might nod at this.
But is it really Big Brother? Or just a concerned friend looking out for everyone's well-being?
People tend to work better when they're being watched. It's called the Hawthorne effect: Those being studied change their behavior simply because they're being studied.
A friend who used to work construction told me that everyone goofed off when the boss left. When the boss returned, the pace picked up. Workers didn't feel like they were being babysat; they just instinctively worked harder to look good for management.
Would employee focus improve if we could monitor how they're feeling? Bank of America is among the companies that have explored systems “that monitor worker emotions to boost performance and compliance,” MIT Sloan Management Review reports.2
On the other hand, employees who feel mistrusted or mistreated also feel less engaged. It's hard to imagine a resulting increase in productivity—the reason for monitoring in the first place.
So is monitoring our people even worth it?
There's research behind both views.
My Buddy and Me
It's never been easier for organizations to analyze their employees and see how they spend their time. A hospital near Orlando, Florida, used monitoring software to track nurses and care staff during their shifts.3 Employees wore badges embedded with sensors, allowing administrators to pinpoint visits to patients, the nurses' station, and supply rooms.
The software uncovered inefficiencies—such as when certain supply rooms were understocked, forcing nurses to walk farther for what they needed. The problem was fixed, and the staff was grateful.
We don't tend to think of this as Big Brother. It's more like Helpful Buddy who heeds the Google mantra of “don't be evil.” Any forfeiture of privacy is mitigated by the beneficial use of gathered information.
In the same vein, software can now monitor every keystroke and website visit—accountability that improves productivity. It's Hawthorne in action: Once employees know they're being watched, they become more efficient.
Such technology also reveals speedbumps and waste. Are employees losing time switching between tasks? Do their programs create distraction? Armed with answers, employers can address issues and train their staff to be more efficient.
And monitoring is fast becoming indispensable for organizations with teams at multiple locations. As I remind clients, you can no longer manage people by just walking around the office. Many employees work on different continents.
Telling patterns and variables also emerge from tracking. A FedEx driver I know swears by the company's monitoring policies. FedEx knows the location of every driver at a given moment, routes taken, and time spent at each stop.
The data leads to more efficient routes, allowing him to finish shifts more quickly. He just goes where his GPS tells him. “Sometimes I have no idea why they send me the way they do,” he says. “But they know the quickest way.”
Finally, monitoring can also improve employee training. “This call might be monitored for quality assurance purposes” goes way beyond what we could have imagined just a few years ago.
Some call-center employers now receive real-time coaching from artificial intelligence software that evaluates their speech and interactions. I did a six-city tour with one of these companies to speak to their clients alongside a demonstration of their newest product. It was amazing what they equip their people with to shape the customer experience.4 Their AI adviser might suggest talking more slowly or warn them that the customer appears upset.
Helpful Buddy, at your service.
Big Brother Is Watching
Employees unhappy with being watched often aren't concerned about privacy. What irks them is the result of the watching: bad decisions that diminish their work lives.
A company that blocks social media during work hours might also be blocking key sources of creativity. Many graphic designers, for example, frequent Pinterest for inspiration. Blocking it actually stunts their productivity.
And when organizations restrict their computers, the action doesn't necessarily apply to personal phones. Employees simply switch to their own devices for full Internet access.
This echoes back to the futility of “social media as theft.” In a Cisco survey of 3,600 younger workers, 56 percent said they would ignore a workplace ban on social media or not accept the job in the first place.5
Late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon summed up the issue: “A college in Pennsylvania is blocking computer access to social-networking sites for an entire week and then requiring the students to write an essay about the experience. Yep. The essay will be called, ‘We All Have Smartphones, Dumb-Ass.’”6
It becomes much less funny when we veer into privacy concerns. In The Circle, a novel by Dave Eggers, a powerful tech company develops real-time cameras that users wear to become “transparent,” sharing every detail of their lives. Privacy isn't just lost; it becomes, in a perversion of Google's philosophy, the evil that society needs to oppose. Of course, this isn't just the stuff of fiction. Companies like Buffer actually use the word “transparent” in glowing fashion, patting themselves on the back for opening up everyone's e-mail to the whole company for reading.7 Of course, the dark underbelly of this transparency is that people find workarounds. If e-mail is open, they'll text instead.
Or even more extreme, consider Epicenter, a company in Sweden where employees enthusiastically volunteer to be chipped.8
Implanted between thumb and forefinger, the rice grain-sized microchip lets workers open doors, use printers, and buy food with a wave of their hand. Epicenter employees love the convenience and future-cool of being “cyborgs.”
They seem to give less thought to the employee data that's being generated, information that could ultimately subvert their privacy and leave them vulnerable to hackers.
A final strike at Big Brother is the Pygmalion effect: the tendency for people to act the way they're treated. Employees treated with suspicion are more likely to fulfill the perception.
Is there a way to see how our people allocate attention without alienating them?
Finding Balance in Technology
The idea of Big Brother is a great placeholder for trepidation about technology at work and in the larger world. The truth is you can harness tech to the benefit of everyone in your organization. Following are a few things to consider when debating how to use tech for visibility insights at your company.
Individual Accountability
The information harvested in The Circle, and even in the real-life example of Epicenter, is itself neither good nor bad. The question is how it's used and who benefits from it.
People will trade privacy for convenience and insight (which may explain the parties Epicenter employees throw for colleagues agreeing to be chipped). Insight can lead to accountability, then self-improvement. On the other hand, they will riot over privacy concerns when they perceive the technology is giving them neither.
Last year, a friend of mine joined Weight Watchers, downloaded the app, and set his goals. Traditionally, members went to meetings to hold themselves accountable.
But my friend never attended a meeting. He simply entered everything he ate and detailed each minute of exercise. The app tracked his daily points and showed his progress throughout the day.
At first, his daily points ran out sooner than expected. Weight Watchers has a saying: “If you bite it, you write it.” So in went the muffins, M&Ms, and cookie dough (and all happiness, I would imagine).
The picture that emerged motivated him to improve his diet and fitness. The app transformed select bits of his private life into usable insights.
As leaders, we can take a valuable lesson from a simple diet app. Sometimes our people don't realize how much time they're wasting. We can provide technology that lets them see exactly what they're doing so they can boost productivity on their own.
Rather than using the tool to punish those who spend too much time browsing social media, use it to reward those who are particularly disciplined. This subtle choice is the difference between employees viewing leadership as members of their team and an us-versus-them culture. No one works hard to help the other team succeed.
Analyzing “Safe” Data
With the right guardrails, you can use technology to get unprecedented visibility into what is happening in your organization.
A client of mine with hundreds of remote teams around the world wanted to find out how much time employees spent on e-mail. Were there particular teams that were more distracted? Any who managed communication flow distinctly well? While they have full access to all emails sent through their server, they rightfully considered the relational and time cost of mining through all employee e-mails. PKC Security, a boutique tech consultancy the client had used in the past, offered a unique solution. Since the cybersecurity company had experience with surveillance, they used tools to protect employee privacy while extracting useful data. They created a product that analyzed the metadata like subject lines, dates, senders, and recipients without reviewing actual e-mail content.
It's amazing what you can learn from “safe” data—information that no one cares you know. From a month of email records, PKC identified which tasks employees wasted the most time on, which teams collaborated well, which were micromanaged (or passive aggressive), which employees were distracted or distracting others, and which teams most likely would ditch email for tools like Slack.
This is the actual graphic they created (Figure 13.1). When visualizing how teams send e-mails, the teams that communicated most efficiently looked like large interconnected blobs, with members e-mailing one another directly. Less functional teams looked like a hub and spoke: The person in the middle was the one most likely to slow everyone down, distracted by managing e-mails that kept the whole team coordinated. The total number of e-mails as well as the ratio of interconnected blobs to hub and spokes patterns speaks to the overall health of how the organization communicates.
Figure 13.1 Visual Representation of E-mail Communication in a Global Organization over One Month.
The visual representation of the data gave leaders the insights they needed to help teams, adjust processes, select technology, and develop targeted communication skills training; all while protecting the privacy and trust of the employees.
Forming Habits
In the same way we use technology for individual accountability, we can promote tools that help our people self-manage and create good habits.
Routine is a foundation of quality focus. And it doesn't actually take long to replace bad habits with good ones. Once rewired, our brains can help us cut through distractions more easily.
Infusionsoft, which makes customer relationship management and marketing automation software for small businesses, uses a reporting tool called Execute To Win to enhance self-management and good habit-building. ETW helps employees establish and track their goals, providing visibility to managers.
At Infusionsoft, employees give weekly updates on their top three quarterly goals. They can label a goal's status—“on track” or “falling behind,” for example—allowing the company to make adjustments and get ahead of problems.
In writing this book, I've been using Streaks, a simple app that lets me set daily tasks with the goal of turning them into habits. Streaks accommodates as many as six activities, anything from flossing to walking the dog. Every time I complete a task, my streak is extended—a great way to rewire the brain for productivity.
One Platform
We discussed how moving communication to the platform you are working from can reduce switching and thus increase focus. There's another benefit in the category of visibility. Efficiency and transparency increase if you can keep work and communication on a single platform that integrates well with other tech.
With project-management programs such as Basecamp, Asana, and Trello, you can create tasks, check in, and course-adjust for changing conditions. (Asana, in fact, is helping expedite this book by keeping me in sync with my editors at every stage of production.)
These tools facilitate workflow by consolidating all conversations and content germane to a project without forcing your people to switch between programs. Projects are moved in stages for full visibility. The programs also play well with e-mail and content management systems, for instance, so that no details fall through the cracks.
Technology that's focus-wise serves you and your people instead of the other way around.
Now That I Have Your Attention…
For Section 4 reflection questions, summary video, and next step resources, please visit focuswise.com/book