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Op-Ed: Employee monitoring and AI — Next generation of paranoia?

Pay attention to these issues, because it could be your neck in the noose.

Around 41 percent of executives in leading economies say they will employ fewer people within five years due to AI
Around 41 percent of executives in leading economies say they will employ fewer people within five years due to AI - Copyright AFP I-Hwa CHENG
Around 41 percent of executives in leading economies say they will employ fewer people within five years due to AI - Copyright AFP I-Hwa CHENG

When employee surveillance became a thing, the result was inevitable. Employees immediately found workarounds. The surveillance barely works at all. The surveillance itself was bizarre. Millions could be spent on meaningless procedures in the name of productivity and security which surveillance simply can’t deliver.

It doesn’t work and it never has.  Productivity has become a joke. The same people who spend days in meetings creating ever-more elaborate time-consuming steps and processes are talking about “productivity”?

Years ago, you could just walk in somewhere and get a job. You weren’t “monitored” by massive expensive systems. If you needed to go to the bathroom, you might get heartfelt sincere cheers from your colleagues, but not some ridiculous idiot with a stopwatch.

The “employees are the enemy” motif has never been very useful. A slight digression is in order here on the subject of productivity.

The definition of productivity is simply put as “goods and services produced”. There’s a dollar value metric applied to measure productivity. This utterly disingenuous definition has even found its way down to meeting dwellers and junior supervisors.

Nothing could be more misleading.

Consider if you will the nature of monitoring productivity, which is what employee surveillance is supposed to do.

It’s an interesting picture.

You now spend months to hire staff at great expense. I can remember getting a job in half an hour. An entire bureaucracy automatically forms about every job. With even moderate turnover, this is incredibly wasteful, expensive, and time-consuming. This is productive?

You enforce meaningless metrics like KPIs to prove productivity. Employee A does 20 phone calls in 40 minutes worth $1000 to the business. Employee B gets a customer paying $100,000 in 20 minutes. Under this system, Employee A is supposedly the productive employee based on the number of phone calls? How?

On the same basis, an employee who spends all day getting everything wrong is productive, entirely based on metrics. How could that be productive?  

You have yearly or six-monthly reviews to tell you whether an employee is up to scratch or not. Why aren’t your managers and supervisors able to decide on the spot in seconds? How is this productive?

Bathroom breaks are productive. They’re health issues, not excuses for bean counting. You’d think they were illegal with the culture of bizarre objections to the call of nature. This is just unhygienic, not productive.

Are you out of your minds?

Don’t blame “compliance”. Nobody told you to spend unnecessary millions on how you employ people. It’s how you do basic employment that’s costing you a fortune for no good reason.

Now envisage this Workers Paradise blessed with algorithms and AI. Any barely awake mathematician will tell you that algorithms inevitably have exceptions, like disparate data in marketing. You can’t expect to cover all situations with a single subroutine.

How is AI, particularly this clunky generation of AI, supposed to understand human behavior? If an AI sees someone sprinting to the bathroom, how does it interpret that information? “Well, you get a human to oversight the Ai”? do you mean perchance the same people you already have onsite paid to do exactly that job without the expense?

Do tell.

The absolute bottom line here is that the fleas are wagging the dog. The culture of hostility to employees is the direct cause of this Idiots Opera of bogus security. It’s easy to appeal to people’s paranoia and insecurities. Productivity is at best an implausible excuse and, at worst a costly bad joke.

This environment couldn’t possibly be less productive. You’ve applied a massive cost to a very simple situation.

The legal situation is far more complex. The employer has the assumed right to oversight anything related to their business within reason. That assumption can be argued very effectively, but let’s keep it straightforward.

By definition, however, this right does not and cannot extend outside relevance to employment. That’s the minefield.

How can AI possibly know what’s reasonable?

A massive breach of privacy is Christmas to any pro bono law firm. A company could easily put itself at serious legal risk with this sort of monitoring. There are terabytes of legal precedents. Now include something like “harassment” as an additional legal issue.

Sound like fun? Does it sound productive of anything but trouble? Can you, as an experienced manager, think of any good reason to simply trust an automated system?

Pay attention to these issues, because it could be your neck in the noose.  

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.

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Written By

Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

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