Employee Tracking Data and the Inevitable Pushback

Last week I had a piece about the development of a new set of technologies that are effectively designed to collect, aggregate, synthesize, and help management interpret every interaction, activity, and action that employees take in the workplace. The idea being that this ocean of data about employee activity - who they meet with, for how long, how many emails they send and to whom, even how often and where they take smoke/coffee/Instagram breaks - can be mashed up with other more traditional workplace measurements about productivity, revenue, performance reviews, etc. to arrive at a more enlightened if not optimal set of recommendations, (and possibly rules) to optimize work and worker activity.

Of course collecting this level and type of data about employee activity, if it indeed catches on in the workplace, will inevitably collide with employee notions about privacy first, and then once most if not all employees accede to this nature of data collection, (perhaps under threat as a condition of employment), to concerns about the 'fair' or proper interpretation of the data. What employee actions and activities are 'good' or 'beneficial' to overall performance of the organization as opposed to the individual's own performance will also be a bone of contention - it really is a big data version of the classic 'results vs. how those results are obtained' conundrum.

It is hard to say how these issues will develop in traditional workplaces, but to catch a glimpse of how it might work out, (and the potential for management vs. employee conflict), I naturally look to the world of sports, in this case NBA basketball.  In the league these days the collection and use of more and more advanced statistics and data about player and team performance are changing the way teams and fans evaluate player performance and attempt to optimize the use of their talent to improve results.

The specific example I want to call out is about David Lee of the Golden State Warriors. By traditional and historical measures, (points, rebounds, assists), Lee is a superior player - as evidenced by his selection to the NBA All-Star team earlier this season. But to those who closely observe the league, and supplemented by more advanced statistical and player movement video technology, Lee's poor play on defense all but cancels out his fine offensive performance - essentially rendering him about an average player on balance.

Lee, to his credit, admits his defensive play has not always been stellar, but his comments about the recent attention being placed on the use of newer data sets and analyses to question his overall contribution is interesting and perhaps a bit instructive -

“At this point I could care less. I’ve worked hard to improve my defense. I think I’m a much better defensive player today than I was a year ago and definitely to start my career. There’s a lot of different numbers to support a lot of different things. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say me putting up 20 and 10 doesn’t matter because ‘numbers don’t matter,’ but at the same time, ‘charts at MIT matter.’ You can’t have it both ways.”

And that part of the quote in bold above - 'You can't have it both ways' - is really at the heart of the problem for the Big Data in the workplace movement as it marches inexorably into the future, (and as in the NBA, the present), of the workplace.

Having more data about employees doesn't necessarily make us any smarter or able to understand that data, and how it might be applied to improve workplace performance. And it definitely doesn't make us any wiser as to how to handle the inevitable employee pushback when our interpretation of performance, backed with the data we think is important, doesn't align with theirs.

With more data we can tell more stories, but we can also find data to justify any story we want to be heard.

David Lee wants us to emphasize the data the paints him in an All-Star light - 20 points and 10 rebounds a night. His detractors want to point out that he is an ineffective interior defensive player - and can point to a new, hardly understood set of charts and graphs to back that up.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, along with one other truth - more data about your employees probably won't make your job as a Talent pro any easier.

Have a great week!

Listen to your CEO. On Twitter

A couple of days before he made bigger news by getting fired, then penning a cheeky letter to the troops letting them know what just happened, then-no-former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, perhaps knee-deep in a frustrating Email session posted this Tweet: 

Possible to write a gmail script to autoreply & bounce emails longer than fifty words?

— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) February 25, 2013

Perhaps an extreme approach to dealing with Email and message length overload, but entirely out of the realm of useful utilities. We hate and need Email at the same time. I'd say for 99% of the people reading this post, Email is the single most important means of communication in your professional lives.

Don't think so?

Just try to go a day, week, month without Email. You can't do it.

You can forget Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn (at least until you need to look for a new job), literally for weeks and weeks and it probably won't really matter. Try that trick with email and you will probably get fired, lose business, or get reported to the police as a missing person.

But the point of this post isn't another 'email is horrible' riff, rather it is to call out a response to the former Groupon CEO's tweet, from a Groupon engineer no less, that was sent exactly one hour and one minute after Mason's original Tweet:

@andrewmason got something working: gist.github.com/rboyd/5027691 -- just customize variables to suit and schedule to run on a timer.

— Robert Boyd (@rboyd) February 25, 2013

Pretty amazing and awesome, and perhaps instructive as a clever method of sucking up getting the bosses attention in this new Age of Social Media. I have no idea if before he was ousted at Groupon if Mason had any kind of relationship, or even knowledge of Mr. Boyd - but let's pretend for a moment that they did not, and Mason (at that time), was the CEO and Boyd was just one of the rank-and-file staff working away, and personally invisible to Mason.

What better way to get on the big bosses radar than answering his Twitter question, within an hour, with a solution that works - and in the middle of the night?

Just another item to add to your bag of tricks as you try and climb up, over, or around the corporate ladder. If your CEO is on Twitter you ought to follow him/her. And maybe just maybe you can help your own career in the process.

'There isn't any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet'

I've been grinding through Nate Silver's book 'The Signal and the Noise' over the last few weeks and while it can, at times, get perhaps a little too deep into some dark statistical alleys, overall it is a fascinating read, and one I definitely recommend if for no other reason than for an excellent chapter on handicapping NBA basketball games.

If there is one major theme or takeaway from the book for me, I think it is best articulated in this quote, about two-thirds of the way through the book, in a chapter about how difficult it can often be in making sense of data, a problem only getting worse as the amount and availability of data continues to explode:

The US Government now publishes data on about 45,000 economic statistics. If you want to test for relationships between all combinations of two pairs of these statistics - is there a causal relationship between the bank prime loan rate and the unemployment rate in Alabama? - that gives you literally one billion hypotheses to test.

But the number of meaningful relationships in the data - those that speak to causality rather than correlation and testify to how the world really works - is orders of magnitude smaller. Nor is it likely to be increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn't any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.

In 2013 I promise that you, as an informed, and opportunistic Talent professional will be hearing, seeing, talking, and thinking about Big Data. Data about job ad posting, data about talent assessment scores, data about compensation and retention, data about engagement, data about performance, and maybe even data about data. 

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, most organizations have plenty of data. More than they know what to do with. And the more they collect, as made really clear in the example above, the chances are high that it won't lead to a faster discovery of the truth - it will just unearth more paths to explore.

Which sometimes, certainly, might be needed, but other times, and maybe most of the time, only results in more ways to get lost.

Don't get caught up chasing data just to have more data. The truth isn't going anywhere, and once you think you have it figured out, and feel that the data you do have supports your beliefs, then you'd probably be better served acting, rather than collecting even more data. 

Have you read The Signal and the Noise yet? Better get on it, just in case it becomes the 2013 version of Moneyball, and you won't want to feel left out!

I'm not really properly motivated

Most readers who are parents would likely agree with me when I say that of all the challenges we face in various parts of our lives, that convincing a stubborn kid to do something, (or more likely, to continue to do something so as it becomes a habit), is probably right up these on the frustrating and maddening scale.

When the kids are really young, say less than 5, logic and reasoning are (mostly) useless as negotiating tactics, and once they get a little bit older they develop a pesky ability to apply their own forms of logic and let's say unique world views to bat back most of your well-reasoned and completely reasonable demands. Never mind that as parents we almost always give up really fast trying to actually see the problem from the kid's perspective, after all, it is the one time in our lives when we have (pretty much) absolute power in the negotiation. And breaking out 'Because I said so' or 'Because I am the parent and you are the kid' might both be fully valid, accurate, and successful ways to put an end to any discussion around behavior modification, they also feel kind of hollow and depressing to have to rely upon, at least too frequently.  Dilbert.com

Whether it's a reluctant kid who can't see the inherent wisdom in simply doing whatever it is you want him/her to do, or a pesky colleague, manager, or subordinate at work that for some reason is having trouble seeing the brilliance (or at least the logic) in whatever fool idea you are pushing, it seems to me it is getting more important all the time to appreciate the absolute value of being able to have your ideas, if not adopted wholly, at least understood and maybe, maybe even supported by collections of folks that have their own ideas about how things should go. Like the kid who does not seem enthused about mundane activities like 'room cleaning', the truth is most folks won't naturally or willingly see the value to them of listening to you, making the 'I'm the boss/parent/teacher/coach' your all-too-frequently uses fall back position, and discussion-ender.

I know all contentious debates do need to come to an end for any progress to be made. The kid's room has to be cleaned, homework has to get done, the TPS reports have to go out, and on and on and on.

But how the debate ends I think is important, and how the accumulation of these endings over time begin to impact the ability of any type of leader, be it a parent, manager, or coach, to get people around them working towards mutually beneficial ends matters.

As a parent, if you keep pulling the 'Because I'm the Dad' line, it is probably a sign of some other kind of problem, perhaps a little bit of a lack of seeing their point of view. As my 11 year old explained to me recently, 'It's not that I don't want to, it's just that I'm not really properly motivated'.

Sure, I could have trotted out the 'Tough luck kid, I am the Dad', (I actually think I did), but there certainly was the feeling that I should not have had to go there. That the kid should have intuitively understood the wisdom/logic/importance of whatever it was I wanted him to do. And the fact that he did not, well, that was completely and totally his problem or failing, not mine.

That's how it works when you are the boss, right?

What's your day look like?

If it looks anything like the day awaiting our friend 'Karen' here in the image on the right hand side of this post, then I can state with near certainty, that your day is going to stink.

The image is from an Apple ad for the iPhone 4s and its virtual assistant Siri, that I noticed on the back cover of the April 2012 edition of Men's Journal magazine. Why the ad copy decided to show 'Karen's' day on the iPhone calendar app instead of someone more likely to be a Men's Journal reader, (Dave, Stan, LeRoy, maybe), is the obvious question that came to mind. But putting that minor detail aside, (I'm guessing the same ad probably ran in lots of publications, so trying to nail each outlet's demographic might not have been important), the other thing that jumped out at me when I saw the ad was how horrible Karen's day is shaping up to be, and how that many of the folks reading this post on a Monday morning are looking at similar, dispiriting kinds of schedules.

This is an Apple ad, the paragon of cool, the leader in the latest technology, the company that has defined innovation, engineering, and design for the last 5+ years, and what do we get from the ad touting the wondrous capabilities of the new iPhone and the magical Siri?

A rundown of the classically over scheduled, back-to-back set of meetings where people are talking about things that have already happened, and with little opportunity to actually spend some time thinking, kind of Monday that so many of the managers and leaders in organizations have in front of them today, and probably for most of the rest of the week.

Apple wants you to ask Siri 'What's my day look like?' Well the 'day' they offer up for our pal Karen, full of status meetings, project briefings, and production updates, and a I doubt it will really happen lunch with 'Emily', (I have $100 that says Karen eats at her desk 9 days out of 10), pretty much renders the wonder and potential of new tools like Siri pretty much moot.

In fact, if Karen realized she was staring down a Monday so uninspiring, maybe she would have asked Siri to phone in sick and tried again tomorrow.

So, what's your day look like? Full of updates, status, and briefings like Karen here? 

Or will you actually have time to do something cool?

Happy Monday!