As you know, I am actively researching the connected office.  When I saw these two articles on the Deloitte experiment in Canada and the launching of Humanyze’s smart employee badge, this gave me food for thought.

How do you want to be measured by your employer?  If you are a professional athlete (or like me, an amateur one), your coach keeps track of your stats and your performance by defined metrics.  In my sport, your performance and PBs show direction and improvement. Working with your coach and other athletes in terms of sharing best practices are an indirect function of that improvement.

As an employee, you have been measured by both qualitative and quantitative metrics in the past that are related to output and productivity.  How much I speak in a meeting I do not believe tells you about what I said and how much I prepared for that meeting with facts and figures instead of opinion and rumors.

Measuring for feedback is admirable.  But what exactly you are measuring, and who “owns” that data are both important aspects of that feedback. Network cohesiveness and call completion, measured separately, is one thing but correlated to each other would give you a fuller story.

But can you measure group happiness? In the Canadian article, it discusses Hitachi and its Human Big Data, a wearable device that is outfitted with sensors and collects data 50 times per second. The firm uses data gathered from the device to gauge the happiness of the group.  It could be that the group is actively interacting about how unhappy they are!

What I find admirable about this is measuring existing employees to help them become more productive, vs. finding ways to fire them due to behavior.  I hope that is the rationale for the tools, and not the latter.