The datafication of the workplace

Abstract

Technological changes in the workplace has a long history, but the recent onus on the generation of data as a central part of the digital economy brings about particular transformations that deserve further attention. Communications tools such as phones, email and computers are monitored in many companies, at the same time as new data sources such as social networks, shared calendars or collaborative working tools are being integrated to increase knowledge not only about the professional activities of workers but also about who they are, or what they might be likely to do in the future. In addition, chips, wearables and sensor networks are increasingly integrated within the broader trend of the Internet of Things (IoT)2 to facilitate emotional as well as physical states. The development of machine learning (ML) facilitates the automated processing of information, whilst multimedia databases are being labelled with semantic information to identify and measure activities, and natural language processing (NLP) can extract knowledge from non-structured texts, such as emails and social networking content to perform sentiment and tone analysis. In this report we provide an overview of these trends within the context of Europe, and focus particularly on tools used for hiring, employee surveillance, performance assessment and management. The overview presented here is not intended to be comprehensive, but is intended to identify key trends with concrete examples of prominent companies and tools in this space, as a way to advance further research agendas on the datafication of the workplace.

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