What Happens When Big Data Meets Human Resources?
November 27th, 2013In the mid 1990s, I worked for FedEx and even back then, every minute of the work day had to be accounted for by noting activity codes and times on our timesheets. At random intervals, the bean counters would light fires under our managers’ tails and the managers would get on our cases about, “Productivity.” In short, all the couriers would be brought before their managers and shown a printout of their activity. Faster, faster, faster. Work smarter not harder. And, oh yeah, safety first. *pfft* Yeah, right.
So what would happen is that newbies would actually try to go faster than they already were, they would cause vehicle accidents, sort packages to the wrong containers and get injured; and then the pressure on the managers from above would stop… for a while. This is how they would find the new maximum setting every several months. Anyone with half a clue, that is, those who had been around for a few years, would nod their heads politely, sign the paper and silently think things like, “Blow it out your ass.”
The logic is like this: Keep increasing the pressure on a steam calliope—with the dial already well into the red—until it starts throwing pipes and decapitating onlookers. Now you know how much pressure it can really take.
As for the people who get killed or injured in the process… You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Safety first!
Anyway, so that was the good old days.
Via: The Atlantic:
Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E?mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior. As technologies that analyze language become better and cheaper, companies will be able to run programs that automatically trawl through the e-mail traffic of their workforce, looking for phrases or communication patterns that can be statistically associated with various measures of success or failure in particular roles.
