The Bigger the Brother, the Better?

If you want to know about how to impliment monitoring software?, try watching baseball first. The most amazing thing about baseball is the statistics. For those who don’t watch it, picture this, the second baseman steps out of the dugout and heads to the on deck circle, and prepares to swing. As he does so, the color commentator graciously announces that given his last two strikeouts, the chance of his making a hit in Atlanta against a left handed pitcher is precisely 20.7 percent, while the odds of making a double or better are 5.3 percent.

Compare. Last week your Boss announced, after a long huddle with his $1000 a day consultants?, strategic initiative to introduce new software and reinvent the workflows in the office. He projects he will be able to increase output by 15% while simultaneously cutting the payrolls by 15% within six months. What are his odds?

Meanwhile the coach of the baseball team compares his second baseman’s record for fielding errors against that of his possible replacement. There is a 4% chance that his replacement will make more fielding errors than he will in the two innings remaining, while the pinch hitter has an 8% chance of knocking in the next run. Decision? Pull the second baseman and pinch hit.

Meanwhile the Boss has the staff somewhat traumatized over losing their jobs, and this generates an interesting response from the staff: Walt, his 20 veteran and Dorothy, the sharpest tack in the box, are fed up and start spending an hour or so of each work day sending out resumes. The rest of the staff, whose prospects aren’t so bright, push into a flurry of activity. Margret is sucking up to the boss and proclaiming how brilliant this new strategy is, and Bill has just “accidentally” deleted 3 client files that are going to be lost in the transition.

As the second baseman strolls back to the dugout, surprisingly, he doesn’t brood about the fact that the %!&#$@ statisticians are tracking every move he makes. In baseball that’s life. He got to where he was because he has a great glove, hits consistently, if not too powerfully, and once on base he has a good chance of stealing.

One of the things the consultants proposed, incidentally was a comprehensive monitoring system. The new system would enable the company to know, without any effort on the employee’s part, how much time was being spent preparing each component of each client’s project, as well as who was checking their Yahoo email 12 times a day, and who had their most productive hours after 4pm. The moment word got out about this monitoring system – coffee breaks were automatically doubled while the staff IM’d each other on ways to get the boss fired while a number of highly unauthorized mpegs were scrubbed from the server. Little did they know the monitoring software? was actually installed invisibly last week, and Margret was the only one that knew about it. Every IM, every webpage viewed, every phone call, every program activated, was all logged conveniently for system administrators to view.

In baseball, everyone knows what the ground rules are, and everyone has access to all the statistics. Suppose major league baseball were run by Harold’s? The batting averages would all be kept secret, as would the size of each player’s pay packet. There would be some players who consistently felt they were hitting consistently above their wages, and some who knew that playing the game wasn’t as important as playing the “other” game. They would both be right. Office politics? and favoritism? flourish when information is kept secret, and since any time and energy spent on office politics is time taken away from productive activities why is it tolerated?

The case for having good data about everything in your business is a not hard to make. The more you know, the better decisions you can make – it is that simple. The case for not monitoring is only that it would cost more to monitor than the information was worth. As data collection gets easier and easier, self-interested workers should welcome the idea of knowing as much as possible about their performance, so they can improve, so they can earn more in the long run. The concern most people have about “Big Brother” is not that information is being collected, but that Big Brother is a one way mirror, a mysterious entity that is collecting everything, sharing nothing. “Big Brother” in the Orwellian world is not interested in progress or productivity? - solely in power – and that is why Big Brother is feared and hated. The opposite of Big Brother is a character who is not feared but loved – A good example of this kind of figure, in popular culture, is Yoda?. Yoda sees, Yoda shares, Yoda teaches – helps us all be stronger and helps right prevail over wrong. Who doesn’t want Yoda working for their company?

Here is a prediction?. By 2010, the majority of workstations used in business and government will have a full monitoring suite running 24-7. Hopefully most companies will accept the doctrine that information collected from employees rightly belongs to them and all information collected will be with the consent of the subject. Let’s hope that governments put laws in place to protect employee’s rights to know, and close the door on any Orwellian employers still out there. Lets change the focus completely from spying to group learning. And, by all means, whats good for the employee is even better for management.