Being Watched at Work
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why are we being watched more and more by technology, including in the workplace? Is it an aid to hard work, or prelude to oppression? Wiretap co-founder Jeff Schumann creates software that monitors employee activity on workplace messaging apps. He says his technology is good, and can protect employees from backstabbing co-workers.
But to many, this technology has sinister potential. Professor Andre Spicer at Cass Business School in London says it is a reminder for employees of who is boss.
Ben Waber, president of a firm called Humanyze, tells presenter Ed Butler it has huge potential when it comes to spotting the previously unknown patterns of good productivity. Even having bigger lunch tables in the office canteen can increase output, as workers have more opportunity to chat and share ideas, he says.
(Photo: Giant surveillance desk with monitors. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:09.1 | Coming up, why do more and more firms from office blocks to warehouses use surveillance on their staff? |
| 0:17.2 | It's a way of controlling employees and sometimes controlling them, not so it gets better outcomes from them, but it actually is kind of just showing who's the boss around here. I have tabs on you always, asserting control. |
| 0:29.6 | Yup, workplace monitoring. Why is it spreading? Where will it lead to more obedient staff or to better placed coffee stations? |
| 0:39.1 | We actually have movable coffee machines. I'm really excited about this, |
| 0:41.9 | so that if I need different groups to talk more to each other, we can put the coffee machine in between the groups. |
| 0:46.0 | The amount of interaction that the coffee machine and water cooler account for, roughly 20% of all interaction, and that's crazy. |
| 0:51.7 | Why we're monitoring more and more business daily from the BBC. |
| 1:00.3 | Ever felt like you're being watched? |
| 1:03.1 | Hello, Ed. How are you today? |
| 1:06.3 | Um, fine, thanks. |
| 1:08.9 | May I say how good you look today. |
| 1:15.1 | Okay, so I do program my personal assistant to pay me compliments. |
| 1:19.5 | What of it? |
| 1:20.3 | You know the kind of thing, though. |
| 1:21.6 | Those movie nightmares, yes, covert, sinister, eyes in the walls in the internet age |
| 1:27.2 | with more and more connected devices around us, |
| 1:30.5 | this may not, some think, be so far from reality, or at least not in the workplace. |
| 1:36.2 | We've seen a massive extension of workplace surveillance from simply the boss watching over |
| 1:41.4 | your shoulder to see what you're doing, to counting keystrokes, |
| 1:45.6 | counting output, to increasingly surveilling what you do after work. |
| 1:50.1 | The words there of Andre Spice, a professor of organisational behaviour at the Cass Business School |
... |
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