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Data & Society just published a report entitled Workplace Monitoring & Surveillance:
New technologies are enabling more varied and pervasive monitoring and surveillance practices in the workplace. This monitoring is becoming increasingly intertwined with data collection as the basis for surveillance, performance evaluation, and management. Monitoring and surveillance tools are collecting new kinds of data about workers, enabling quantification of activities or personal qualities that previously may not have been tracked in a given workplace—expanding the granularity, scale, and tempo of data collection. Moreover, workplace monitoring and surveillance can feed automated decision-making and inform predictions about workers' future behaviors, their skills or qualities, and their fitness for employment. Monitoring and surveillance can shift power dynamics between workers and employers, as an imbalance in access to worker data can reduce negotiating power.
This explainer highlights four broad trends in employee monitoring and surveillance technologies:
- Prediction and flagging tools that aim to predict characteristics or behaviors of employees or that are designed to identify or deter perceived rule-breaking or fraud. Touted as useful management tools, they can augment biased and discriminatory practices in workplace evaluations and segment workforces into risk categories based on patterns of behavior.
- Biometric and health data of workers collected through tools like wearables, fitness tracking apps, and biometric timekeeping systems as a part of employer- provided health care programs, workplace wellness, and digital tracking work shifts tools. Tracking non-work-related activities and information, such as health data, may challenge the boundaries of worker privacy, open avenues for discrimination, and raise questions about consent and workers' ability to opt out of tracking.
- Remote monitoring and time-tracking used to manage workers and measure performance remotely. Companies may use these tools to decentralize and lower costs by hiring independent contractors, while still being able to exert control over them like traditional employees with the aid of remote monitoring tools. More advanced time-tracking can generate itemized records of on-the-job activities, which can be used to facilitate wage theft or allow employers to trim what counts as paid work time.
- Gamification and algorithmic management of work activities through continuous data collection. Technology can take on management functions, such as sending workers automated "nudges" or adjusting performance benchmarks based on a worker's real-time progress, while gamification renders work activities into competitive, game-like dynamics driven by performance metrics. However, these practices can create punitive work environments that place pressures on workers to meet demanding and shifting efficiency benchmarks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday March 13 2019, @02:20PM
It's a very tough call, as skin tears and bruises can also be natural consequences of aging. I've seen them happen from people just shifting position in bed. That's why it does take proof. Plus mistakes can happen and anecdotes can run wild, muddying the waters even further. But there have been cases before of concerned families placing concealed cameras in rooms to catch genuine abuse. Sad that it takes that, but that is indeed what it takes sometimes. When it's a genuine patient safety concern there isn't much defense for not monitoring (except for patient privacy) and some hospitals now have in-room video monitoring available.
With that aide: Do you suppose the aide went off and starting perusing Facebook? Or is it more likely that the aide was taking care of ten other things at that moment and the response was de-prioritized. It's a sort of tit-for-tat game with management sometimes, because they certainly won't hire more aides or nurses if those call light increases are happening. Instead the workers won't get raises, or will be replaced with fresh blood that isn't burnt out. It also comes down to understanding what the call light represents... Is it truly a license for a client to have people drop everything they're doing and attend to that person's needs, or do staff need to have latitude in prioritizing whose needs come first? Call light goes off, client is checked to make sure that this isn't an emergency or serious medical need, then is prioritized for service as available. (The aide still should have acknolwedged the person and let him or her know that it would be a little bit). Because if there were enough staff to handle every light as they go off, I will guarantee that the unit will have it's staffing level cut back. This, despite the new generation of trying to utilize patient satisfaction as a care measure despite insurers not throwing anything into the pot monetarily to drive levels higher.
This sig for rent.