People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us About the Future of Work

Collaboration is a 21st century buzz word. Ben Waber uses science to prove how collaboration adds significantly to a company’s bottom line.If I told you that “changing how people spent 15 minutes of their day” could yield $15 million in profit, would you believe me?You should because Ben Waber et al. proved it in the their experiments namely the water cooler effect during his research at MIT. He wrote his findings as a fantastic read called People Analytics: How social sensing technology will transform business and what it tells us about the future of work.Waber collected data from modified employee worn id badges and analyzed the effects of human interactions. While email data can easily be mined to produce a description of written office communication, Waber and his team at MIT wanted to capture the ‘hidden’ communication in office settings.The value of the coffee breakWaber et al. studied the effects of synchronized coffee breaks for call center employees at Bank of America. The results showed conclusively that employees were more cohesive and less stressed as a result of taking their ‘coffee’ breaks with colleagues. The experiment did not require employees to communicate, they did that naturally. The orchestrated communication made employees feel more cohesive. These factors increased productivity and significantly decreased employee turnover. All significantly increasing BoA’s bottom line.Co-location and outsourcing software developmentNext, Waber investigated remote teams working together. Obviously, teams working together, at the same location, is ideal. But, what about remote teams? How can we increase their productivity? For instance, Is it worth it to fly everyone in and meet face to face before starting a project? Does that expense increase the remote team’s productivity. Waber proved an emphatic yes. When teams met face-to-face before the project they understood each other better, trusted each other better, and were better at collaborating afterwards.Waber sums up the importance of collaborations as follows:“In additional to doing away with this individual view of productivity, we need to get rid of the notion of the lone genius. An easy way to think of our creativity, and our impact on our colleagues as a whole, is to think about how much work we can actually get done by ourselves. Imagine you discover a way to increase your performance by 10%. Assuming you work 40 hours a week, you can end up saving 4 hours of your time every week by using this new method you’ve discovered. If you keep it to yourself, over one year you will end up saving about 200 hours.But, what if you shared your discovery with 5 of your closest coworkers? Maybe it takes you a while to teach them this new method, say 20 hours. In that case, individually you would only save 180 hours, but collectively everyone would save 1,200 hours in that first year. On top of that, however, you’ve now created a community where sharing tips is expected… etc. (199-200)Of course, as Waber emphasizes, we must be very careful about privacy employee privacy issues.I recommend the book.

With the use of sociometric badges, with sensors such as microphone, IR transceiver, accelerometer and Bluetooth radio, one can acquire sensed data which can be combined with other data such as email communications to glean insights into how people in a company interact or don't interact, and infer networks of interaction among people. This can bring insights into how cohesion affects people and their productivity. The book explains these ideas as well as elaborates on particular applications of this technique. Some interesting results include the justification that face-to-face meetings are important and the Internet collaboration tools might not be enough, and that cohesion has a big role to play in productivity, in creativity, in distributed software development where there are dependencies and in the success of mergers. How the future will be is an interesting question, whether such sensors will be commonplace with wearable technologies. The book could have perhaps been a little more technical or provide more details about the data collected and how the analytics was done but the focus is understandably on business impact.

Though I am a small business owner, I was excited to see where sociology would take the likes of the new Google type business model. I was wrong. There were so many holes I could punch, I am at a loss where to begin? The Dunbar number factor (the average person can handle only so many relationships), most infidelities are between co-workers (no one really wants an office romance on their hands), noise level issues when slamming that many people into a space (cs departments have had to add noise cancelling systems into their spaces,the problem is, those noise cancelling systems can make employees so nauseous they cannot work, muting head phones are just as disorienting), so many things were not factored into what the employer could really expect from such a business model.Time will tell. I found a thousand excuses and poorly lit plans on what really should be a managers job? Here is what a CEO should know, hire middle management that will: Be close to your employees, care about their personal needs, be open minded to their ideas, pay attention when they do a job well, stop watching the clock and start seeing who gets the actual work done, and then turn around and tell you what you need to know, honestly. Basics are being pushed aside for monitoring systems, a disorienting/chaos theory/throw everyone in a big room and see what gets done "business model" with high tech screens and systems in place of decent middle management. Huh? Stalin-ism in the workplace? Some awesome concepts in this book: Social media is going to bring your employees closer together (or they will spend your hourly wage hitting on their exes..or starting an office romance)? If someone is sick, keep them at work (or, DUH, let them go home for 3 days and get better faster and not get everyone else sick)? Bring back the water cooler so people feel closer at work (or have a manager that makes their employees feel like their job is validating and they aren't just another drone)?

I had the privilege of hearing Ben talk in Boston prior to the publication of the book. He has a very plainspoken direct presentation of compelling information about the impact of human interactions which comes across in his talks as well as his writing. I actually, honestly, hate most business books as they tend to follow the format of- present the theory and then crush you to death with boredom retelling the theory with repetitive examples that offer little further consideration. Ben's book is not like that at all- it is builds in layers a compelling view of the complexity of human interactions in a variety of work settings from customer service to banking to healthcare. I loved it and eagerly await his next publication.

The book brings a lot of new ideas about management people inside the organization management need to undertake analysis to understand the context of working places and give the employees insights are directions for a new way of working and productivity.

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