T
TALKING HEADS
Nathalie Nahai
Employee data:
this time it’s personal
P
ersonalisation practices are
everywhere – from the search
results and marketing emails
we receive, to the behaviourally
targeted ads we encounter. Love it
or loathe it, unless you live ‘off the
grid’, personalisation is unavoidable.
Though relevant, personalised
content may increase engagement
(whether through participation with
the content, increased purchase
intention or direct action), there is
also a hidden psychological cost.
If you’ve ever felt that creepy
sense of unease when receiving a
hyper-specific, targeted advert from
a brand you don’t know or have
never bought from, you will have
experienced this phenomenon.
A version of this happened in a
very public way, when the Cambridge
Analytica story broke. When millions
of Facebook users realised they had
been at the sharp end of a profound
breach of trust, the motivation to
regain their personal freedom (from
being tracked and capitalised on
without explicit consent) led many
to reduce their participation on the
platform, or abandon it altogether.
Once dismissed as the purview
of the paranoid, this feeling that
our every move is being watched,
analysed and monetised no
longer seems quite so far-fetched.
If left unchecked, it can lead to
devastating outcomes for even
the most robust companies. While
the appropriate collection and use
of personal data can bring rich
benefits from an HR perspective,
such as providing feedback about
performance, wellbeing and personal
development, the ethical inflection-
point for deploying such practices
rests upon a fulcrum of employer
intent and employee consent.
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Future Talent
Of course, the use of employee
data per se is neither good nor
bad – the ethical component
emerges through the intent and
the methodology we choose to
apply. Imagine, for instance, that you
turn up to work one morning to be
issued with an employee ID lanyard.
Nothing too unfamiliar so far. Now
imagine that this badge is actively
tracking your every movement and
interaction, from where you are in
the building and who you are with,
to the length of your conversations
and even your tone of voice and
speech patterns. Chances are, you
might think twice about showing
up again the next day. Or imagine
that biometric sensors were
surreptitiously monitoring how long
you were at your desk, as happened
in 2016 at The Daily Telegraph (they
were removed after just a day
following employee outrage).
Even when done transparently,
data tracking can give rise to
unwanted behaviours. Employees
may try to game the system, for
example by avoiding harder jobs or
taking harmful short cuts (between
2011 and 2015 employees at Wells
Fargo set up more than a million
fake employee accounts to meet
weekly targets).
It can also lead to employees
acting in ways that hinder innovation,
making them less willing to spend
time helping out colleagues or
spending time discussing off-topic,
but potentially fruitful, ideas. It
can result in workers focusing on
shorter- term, more measurable
projects. And it may cause
employees to turn to their own
devices or emails instead of the
official ones, increasing the risk of
cyber-security breaches.
“
Once dismissed
as the purview
of the paranoid,
this feeling
that our every
move is being
watched,
analysed and
monetised no
longer seems
quite so
far-fetched
”
So how far is too far? It all comes
down to trust. Cited as one of the
single most-important factors in the
development and maintenance of
happy, well-functioning relationships,
trust, once breached (or even when a
seed of doubt has been planted), can
be incredibly difficult to build back
up. When it comes to the workplace,
where the balance of power is far
more one sided than in personal or
even consumer relationships and
where no company is immune to
a hack, businesses need only make
one small misstep to undermine their
reputation and the trust and respect
of their employees.
If we are to make the most of
what these new technologies have
to offer, we have to approach them
with explicit ethical conditions for
their use. We have to ask whether
the tools we use are genuinely
harnessing the full potential of
employees, or are putting an
unwanted yoke around their necks.
Nathalie Nahai is a web psychologist,
speaker and author of Webs
Of Influence: The Psychology Of
Online Persuasion.