Wow. I can't imagine working for someone who uses this device. It will, imo, widen the gap between employees and management. Whatever happened to "hands on" and interpersonal relationships which foster better employees?

How your boss can keep you on a leash
By Bob Greene, CNN Contributor

CNN) -- If you're a person who hates it when your supervisor looks over your shoulder at work, you may want to stop reading this column right now.

Because what follows is only going to depress you.

Hitachi, the big electronics company based in Japan, is manufacturing and selling to corporations a device intended to increase efficiency in the workplace. It has a rather bland and generic-sounding name: the Hitachi Business Microscope.

But what it is capable of doing ... well, just imagine being followed around the office or the factory all day by the snoopiest boss in the world. Even into the restroom.

And, the thing is, once you hear about it, you just know that, from a management point of view, it is an innovation of absolute genius.

Here's how it works:

The device looks like an employee ID badge that most companies issue. Workers are instructed to wear it in the office.

Embedded inside each badge, according to Hitachi, are "infrared sensors, an accelerometer, a microphone sensor and a wireless communication device."

Hitachi says that the badges record and transmit to management "who talks to whom, how often, where and how energetically."

It tracks everything.

If you get up to walk around the office a lot, the badge sends information to management about how often you do it, and where you go.

If you stop to talk with people throughout the day, the badge transmits who you're talking to (by reading your co-workers' badges), and for how long.
........

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.

And if employees bristle and become resentful about being kept on such a short electronic leash, that could bring about productivity problems of a different sort. Unhappy workers are not motivated to put in extra effort.

Of course, the employees could get up from their desks, congregate in an out-of-the-way corner of the office, and bitterly complain about it all.

But the badges would know.

And tell.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/02/opinion/g ... Stories%29

Most companies require employees to wear ID badges. They could already be snooping on us for all we know...

Another "sign of the times" ~ most larger companies don't care if you get the occasional email at work or spend a few minutes chatting with co-employees, but they do not want you trolling Facebook for half the day ~ and don't kid yourself: there are plenty of employees who DO and/or find other ways to waste time ~ while it is definitely personally invasive, I always looked at my time as belonging to the firm when I was at work ~

So I'm thinking if you're not "cheating" the company/firm of time it is paying you for, you have nothing to worry about ~ and yes, I recognize that is easier for me to say now that I'm retired ~

Sooz