New Mobile-Sensing Systems helping Businesses track Employee Performance

By CIOReview | Thursday, July 18, 2019

Businesses can now access and evaluate an employee's performance with the new mobile-sensing system using smartphones.

FREMONT, CA: Thanks to technology as finding the most skilled talent for an institution is no longer restricted by location. The ability to work remotely has increased significantly over the past few years, allowing for more flexibility on both the employer and employee. Researchers have developed a mobile-sensing system that assesses employee performance using smartphones, wearable fitness trackers, and a custom app. New mobile sensing has opened ways for consumer technology to help employees optimize their performance. This allows companies to evaluate how individuals are performing in their jobs. The approach can be a complement and an alternative as well to traditional performance tools like interviews and self-evaluations. It is a new approach to evaluate workplace performance using passive sensing data from phones and wearables.

In this new system, a smartphone tracks physical activity, phone usage, location, and ambient light. The fitness tracker monitors heart functions, stress, sleep, and body measurements, including calorie and weight consumption. Location beacons, located in the home and office, provides information on the time at work and breaks from the desk. All the data is processed by cloud-based machine learning algorithms trained to classify workers by performance level. It is a step towards boosting performance through passive sensing and machine learning. With the ability to give feedback to both the employer and employee, the mobile-sensing system is intended to unlock the practices that drive performance.

The passive monitoring method also offers benefits over traditional survey techniques that require manual effort and are seen as burdensome, unreliable, and potentially biased. This is the primary reason that mobile sensing has been used to analyze high and low performance in operators across different businesses. The passive monitoring system is intended to be empowering. This approach could undoubtedly benefit companies, but can also be helpful to individual employees who are looking to boost their performance. The latest technology can produce an added objective measure of performance that offers a better understanding of the workplace. Continuous monitoring using consumer technology was combined with traditional questionnaires to categorize performance.