Social tools for tracking your employees

Image via CrunchBase

Cool or creepy?

Earlier this year, my buddy Mike Haberman wrote about the risks of tracking your employees via GPS.

Trucking and delivery companies have been using these types of fleet tracking systems for years.  Websites like Guru that allow you to hire freelancers now offer tools that allow to track their virtual work via a dashboard based tool.

Technology allows us to track work, but we may be on the cusp of a new wave of technological tracking innovation for the workplace.

Researchers at the University Of Rochester in New York recently announced that they were able to utilize data from Twitter to predict flu outbreaks with a high degree of accuracy.   The day when employers will be able to use social media conversations to predict when you are thinking of taking a sick day can’t be far off.

Today on Mashable, there was a very interesting story detailing how companies will soon be able to use tools like Yammer to track morale.

Bosses who want help gauging employees’ morale can now turn to Microsoft’s workplace social network, Yammer. A new feature offers managers a kind of emotional surveillance system, showing which feelings workers are expressing in messages posted to a company’s Yammer network.

Bosses who want help gauging employees’ morale can now turn to Microsoft’s workplace social network, Yammer. A new feature offers managers a kind of emotional surveillance system, showing which feelings workers are expressing in messages posted to a company’s Yammer network.

The feature, called Crane, was developed by startup Kanjoya, which makes software that does the emotion recognition and logging, with close collaboration with Yammer. Once the feature is switched on for a company’s Yammer network, it offers managers a view of the “trending emotions” within a company, using a line graph to show the level of excitement, confusion and other feelings over time.

The topics or words most often associated with those feelings are also shown. The software is able to identify 80 distinct emotions, but it condenses those into 15 for display and shows only the most prevalent ones to reduce the complexity of the interface.

How long can it be until we see a decision saying that an employer used their internal social networking system to illegally interfere with the ability of employees to engage in protected concerted activity?

 

 

 

 

Tagged as: Crane, Employment, Kanjoya, Microsoft, New York, Social network, twitter, Yammer