#quantified employee

Space planning The collaboration insights from Workplace Analytics were used by an organization to partner with its commercial real estate company, CBRE, to do space planning. They analyzed the metadata attached to employee calendar items to calculate the travel time associated with meetings. They found that as a result of the relocation, each employee reduced their travel time to meetings by 46 percent—resulting in a combined total of 100 hours saved per week across all 1,200 employees involved in the move.

The long-term question will be whether companies, in the name of workplace output, will want to risk the morale problems that will inevitably arise among employees who are instructed to wear such devices, manufactured either by Hitachi or by other firms that will engineer their own digital tracking machinery. Technology always wins, but victory can come with a price.