Linked: Steak With A Side Of Surveillance: Outback Restaurants Adding Employee-Tracking Analytics To Its Cameras
I’ve been saying this for years, stop making your employee management problems an issue for IT to fix:
Turning personnel management over to tech solutions seldom results in better management or better employees
As the Techdirt article below details, what you’re likely to get is more of whatever it is you decide to measure. Just because we now have technology that can track how much time every employee spends doing “X”, or how fast they can go from A to B, doesn’t necessarily correlate with doing a good job. Hurrying customers out of a restaurant in order to make the line of people waiting go faster, or becoming much less personable because those human interactions are going to hurt the statistics, is probably not a good business practice, but if you reward it, you’ll get more of it.
But, of course, the appeal is that this becomes super simple. Instead of actually managing people, we let the numbers make all of the decisions for us.
At some point, we are going to have to reckon with the fact that every employee is under constant surveillance, and what that does to the culture of our business, and the relationship we have with those employees.
Nothing says you’re a trusted and important part of the team like having your every movement tracked, does it?
