New technologies like AI and machine learning are transforming the workplace. More and more companies are embracing innovations like computer vision and natural language processing to track employees and analyze performance. While data and analytics can provide valuable insights, an over-reliance on AI employee tracking is unlikely to build a great company culture or boost creativity over the long-term. Here’s why.
Lack of Trust
Excessive the best employee tracking software risks deteriorating trust levels. If workers feel their every keyboard stroke is under surveillance, or their facial expressions and emotions subject to algorithmic analysis, they’re unlikely to bring their best creative selves to the office each morning. Psychologists have long established trust as a fundamental building block of high-performing teams. Remove trust from the equation, and no amount of AI data crunching can inspire humans to go the extra mile.
Data Blind Spots
Even the most advanced AI has blind spots. Computer vision systems can log bathroom breaks and analyze smiles, but struggle to understand subtle human behaviors that build relationships and community. Likewise, natural language processing cannot accurately decipher complex emotional states from snippets of conversations. While AI tracking provides a wealth of data, it fails to capture the full picture of human dynamics and company culture that lead to breakthrough innovations.
Lack of Ethics
Ubiquitous employee monitoring raises complex ethical questions around privacy, dignity, and basic human rights. Existing laws and regulations struggle to keep pace with rapid advances in surveillance capabilities. Without a strong ethical framework and employee consent processes in place, excessive tracking via AI risks overstepping boundaries in legally and morally questionable ways. This not only sabotages morale and culture, but opens companies to reputational damage and potential lawsuits.
Creative Constraints
Fixed algorithms, no matter how advanced, impose a constrained and somewhat mechanistic view of the world. Companies relying too heavily on prescribed metrics and benchmarks to monitor performance run the risk of limiting flexible thinking and serendipitous discoveries. Truly game-changing innovations rarely follow standard templates and procedures. A great company culture leaves space for humans to imagine freely, challenge assumptions, and follow inspiration where it leads.
Lack of Human Judgment
AI has no capability for human judgment, critical thinking, or understanding nuanced situations. An algorithm detecting 20 bathroom breaks by an employee in a single day might flag it as a productivity issue. A human manager would recognize that person might be pregnant or have a medical condition. Without empathy and discretion, monitoring activities can misinterpret behaviors in ways that undermine morale and performance judgements. Even worse, bias in algorithms and training data can lead to unfair treatment of groups like minorities, women, disabled persons, etc.
Backlash & Turnover
Heavy-handed tracking tends to breed resentment, not loyalty or engagement. Employees who feel constantly surveilled, data-mined, and reduced to performance metrics on a dashboard will grow increasingly frustrated and unhappy. Not only does this crush creativity and innovation, it increases costly turnover as talented people leave for companies with better cultures and leadership. This brain drain ripples across all areas of business performance.
The Illusion of Control
While reams of data provide the illusion of control and oversight, numbers alone cannot build trust, community, strategic thinking, or innovation. Over Indexing on metrics often distracts leaders from the underlying human dynamics that allow great companies to constantly adapt and stay ahead of disruption. Data should inform human intuition, not attempt to replace it. Without keeping the human elements of judgment, ethics, wellbeing and inspiration at the center, even the most advanced AI tracking can derail a company’s ability to compete amid accelerating change.
Conclusion
AI promises new ways to capture productivity metrics and analyze workplace performance. However, an over-reliance on automated employee tracking neglects the fundamentals of great leadership and culture; trust, community, ethics, inspiration, critical thinking and human judgment. While data and algorithms provide valuable supplements to inform management, companies that ignore the human factors risk declining performance, turnover and disruption. The best approach balances technology and transparency with the discretion, empathy and relationship-building at the heart of every creative, resilient and ultimately successful organization. Leaders who keep both the human and data elements in mind will sustain excellence even amid turbulence and uncertainty.
