Humanyse

How are you doing at work? OK? Very well? Slightly underperforming? Probably a mixture of the three, depending on how your day is going. But it can be very hard to actually know.

Such vagueness, however, doesn’t with well with the corporate world, which explains the current vogue for near constant performance reviews, work goals and self-assessment.

But if that all seems rather, well, lo-tech then worry no more: Humanyze, a company based in Boston Massachusetts, is pioneering the use of wearable technology to help companies understand their staff and improve performance levels at work.

“Humanyze helps companies improve by understanding their people,” the company claims on its website. “We combine wearable sensors and digital data to deliver people analytics and insights to our customers.”

Humanyze claims that its Sociometric smart badges can capture “face to face interaction, interpersonal dynamics and social signalling” among staff. They do this by tracking employee movements and conversations, using a microphone to monitor how often staff talk to each other and how long they spend talking versus listening.

If that sounds slightly worrying, then Humanyze CEO Ben Waber is at pains to point out that the badge does not actually record what people say.

“In real time, there is voice processing, so we’re looking at, again, how much I talk, where I spend time. And that data is always aggregated,” he tells Boston radio station WBUR, adding that individual employees are the only ones allowed to see their own data.

This, it turns out, is pretty crucial. “If you go into a company and you say ‘Hey, here’s this sensor, measures a lot of stuff about you. Wear this.’ I mean, no one’s going to do it, right?,” Waber explains.

“And that’s why it takes, when you first rolled out at a company, it’s about a four-week roll-out process, because we have to introduce this technology and say ‘Listen, this is what we do. Here’s what we’ve done in the past. Look at this consent form. Take a look at it, read it through. In plain English, it describes what we do.’”

After collecting this data, Humanyze then uses analysis algorithms to assess how companies can meet their strategic goals with employees.

“What we’re able to do with this kind of data is essentially say ‘Well, let’s actually test out the way we manage the business.’” Waber tells WBUR. For example, instead of rolling out a training programme to all staff, a company can offer training to half of its employees, then use Humanyze data analysis to see if it has affected how people work.

In 2009, Humanyze worked with the Bank of America, looking at productivity and turnover among call centre employees.

Using data collected by its smart badges, Humanyze uncovered “a lack of social engagement among teammates”, which could negatively impact performance and productivity.

To counter this, it proposed specific changes in team scheduling to boost social engagement, such as coordinated coffee breaks. The result, it says, was improved performance and reduced stress and staff turnover.

Humanyze is far from the only company using wearable tech to measure job performance, of course. Recently on this blog we talked about City banks using biosensing wearable devices to track heart rates and hormone levels among traders.

Meanwhile, writing for the Harvard Business Review, H. James Wilson, MD Information Technology and Business Research for Accenture Institute for High Performance, coined the term “physiolytics” – “the practice of linking wearable computing devices with data analysis and quantified feedback to improve performance”.

But what Humanyze does is pretty unique. While City banks use wearable tech to monitor individual performances, Humanyze aims for a holistic understanding of the organisation itself. It looks at the incidentals, if you like, of work performance: how staff socialise and interact and how this influences overall performance.

Call centre stress might sound innocuous compared to billion-dollar trades and high-level decision making. But far more people work in call centres than in financial trading, which makes what Humanyze does more important for the average worker.

Bank of America, for example, employs 10,000 people in US call centres alone. If you can improve the working performance of even a small percentage of these then that is, potentially, a massive turn around.

And while coordinated coffee breaks may not sound like a stroke of genius, it is a move that recognises the vital fact that human workers do need personal attention.

What’s more, Waber says individual employees can use their Humanyze data to improve their own performance and work towards their goals.

“At a purely individual level, essentially you get a Fitbit for your career. Imagine, for example, you’re a programmer, and you say ‘Well, I want to be the best programmer.’ Well, we know in your company what the best programmers do, how they actually work, and we can show you what you do and how you compare to those people,” he tells WBUR.

And that is one reason why workers have, apparently, been very happy to use Humanyze’s smart badges when called upon by their employer.

Could this be the future for the work place? Waber certainly thinks so. “Within about four years, every single company ID badge is going to have these sensors, whether it’s ours or somebody else’s,” he says.

Why should employees not, then, use this to work towards their own personal goals, he argues? “Our feedback is literally 100% positive because we are very transparent and we really, really are focused on helping our individual users really succeed in their careers,” Waber concludes.