HBR's 10 Must Reads on Performance Management

The Happy Tracked Employee

by Ben Waber

DISCUSSIONS ABOUT DATA PRIVACY TEND TO FOCUS on the consumer-seller dynamic. What personal information do companies have a right to collect, and how should they be expected to use and care for it? But another dynamic, between employer and worker, raises even thornier questions.

For years people analytics—the science of using data to manage employees—drew on details about age, gender, and tenure and ratings from performance reviews for insights. But that paltry harvest limited its usefulness.

More recently, sensor technology and real-time data collection have produced bumper crops of employee information for companies. Now managers can access second-by-second feedback on what a worker is doing and, to ...