Thanks to new technologies, employers have many more ways to gather employee data to improve performance, gauge sentiment, measure engagement, monitor safety, root out misconduct, and raise the bar in other ways. And on the face of it, some of those collection methods and data types may seem more “creepy” to employees than others.
Data collected from electronic sensing badges, email headers, online calendars, and social media sites? Creepy. Data collected from employee surveys? Not so creepy.
Not so fast. Before jumping to conclusions about which data practices are perfectly acceptable versus those that cross the line, consider the idea that “creepiness is contextual,” says Dr. Mary Young, principal researcher in the area of human capital management (HCM) at The Conference Board. That is, consider the circumstances before making sweeping judgments, Young advised an audience of HR executives at a workshop in New York.
When The Conference Board investigated new sources of workplace data, Young initially arranged those practices along a Continuum of Creepiness (see the graphic below)—ranging from least to most sensitive, risky, or objectionable.
What eventually became clear, however, is that the degree of creepiness depends on a number of factors, including:
Employees’ right to opt in or opt out. Whether employers are asking their people to take a survey or embed a monitoring device in a limb, employees generally view the practice as less creepy if they have a say in the matter. But in some countries this is a contentious point: There’s debate about whether employees can truly provide uncoerced consent to their employers, due to the power employers hold, notes Bertrand Dussert, Oracle vice president of HCM transformation and a copresenter at the New York workshop.
Employees’ trust in their employer. Companies and organizations with reputations for doing right by their people generally get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to collecting and mining data on their employees. But as the adage goes, trust takes years to build but only seconds to break.
Employer’s transparency. The clearer a company or organization is about the types of data it’s collecting on employees and why, the better chance it will have of getting employee buy-in.
For example, an office of consulting firm Deloitte wanted employees to pilot a badgelike electronic sensor that monitors people’s movements within their environment. Normally, such devices might be viewed as creepy, because they track and report precise interactions with colleagues—who talks with whom, for how long, and whether one person often dominates or interrupts conversations.
But before the trial began, Young says, Deloitte and the vendor, Humanyze, explained that the badges don’t record the content of those conversations. Moreover, they assured employees, Humanyze would aggregate and analyze the data, reporting back the behavior patterns of groups of employees, not of individuals.
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Deloitte also communicated a specific business goal for the experiment—to compare how employees collaborate in a conventional office space with how they collaborate after the office converted to an open plan. Virtually all employees opted in. (Deloitte later realized that the data those devices collect could be a useful coaching tool in its Diversity and Inclusion practice.)
Benefit to employees. The previous point about transparency is especially true if employees view the monitoring and/or data collection as in their interests. Young offers the example of an energy company that outfits oil sands workers in Canada with electronic trackers to capture data, partly to monitor fatigue levels and improve safety. That application seems less creepy than if an employer were using those trackers to spy on its people.
Aggregated data versus personally identifiable data. Employees are far more likely to take a company survey, for instance, if it’s clear to them that their managers won’t have access to individuals’ responses.
Take this example on the creepy end of the Creepiness Continuum: Data mined about employees from their email headers and calendars might at first seem threatening, but what if the data were aggregated and anonymized by a third-party vendor, to analyze broad interaction patterns, allocations of time, and demands made on other people’s time? Less creepy?
Who has access to the personally identifiable data. Much of the value that employers gain from new kinds of employee data comes from linking it to demographics and other human capital data—such as performance, location, function, and tenure—to understand key workforce patterns, Young says. But it’s essential to limit access to individual-level data.
Some companies designate one or two HR analysts to serve as data controllers, she says. Others use a third party to store and protect individual-level data. Such measures, clearly communicated, can assuage employees’ fears. But this also goes back to whether employees trust their employers to keep their word.
Whether the data being analyzed is public or private. Is it more acceptable to most employees for their employers to mine their Facebook posts because they’re public than it is to mine their emails (though they’re still company property)? It’s not cut and dried.
Sometimes creepiness is a function of the shaky assumptions employers make in their data collection. One vendor claims that companies could potentially identify expense fraud by analyzing the social networks of known employee cheaters. The rationale: If Mary Smith was found to be lying on her expense report, employees in her social network are more likely than others to commit expense fraud as well. Really?
National culture, policies, and social values. Europe, Canada, and Argentina, for example, are known to have broad and wide-ranging regulations governing how companies can collect and handle employee data—regulations that generally reflect citizens’ expectations. In the US, such regulations are more specific, Oracle’s Dussert notes, giving explicit protections to certain kinds of data, as is the case with information protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Data practices in countries such as China and Brazil, meantime, are looser. The point is that practices and acceptability vary widely from country to country.
Add age to the cultural dynamic: Digital natives tend to be less creeped out by certain data collection practices than their elders.
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Industry or occupational norms. Call-center agents, package-delivery drivers, and stock traders understand and generally accept that their employers are monitoring them constantly, whether to improve efficiency and safety, fix problems, catch fraud, or ensure regulatory compliance. And technology-based oversight is becoming more common in law enforcement, on the factory floor, in healthcare, and in other circles.
Nonetheless, the stakes can be higher with employees than with customers. Consider the Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness systems casinos use to spot player collusion and card counting at black jack tables. “In gaming the worst thing that could happen to a customer is you might be banned from playing at a casino,” Dussert says. “In law enforcement or at work, employees could lose their freedom. They could lose their job. There’s a much higher level of discomfort if your job or your freedom is on the line.”
What to Do?
Young offers several recommendations to HR executives. Among them: Consult with other functional leaders, including those in legal, risk, privacy, data security, and unions. Establish a governance structure and code of conduct for collecting and using human capital data, one that takes into account employee input. Anonymize and aggregate data to protect the identities of individuals—and offer employees some benefit in exchange for additional data. Communicate data collection practices extensively through HR channels, and address employees’ questions and concerns.
While the Continuum of Creepiness originally seemed like a catchy concept, Young eventually decided it’s an over-simplification. “It isn’t the technology itself—the tool—that’s creepy. It’s how you use it,” she says. “Something as old school as pencil and paper note-taking could also be creepy if it’s used covertly.”
