Passive monitoring in the workplace: Design guidelines for self quantified employee feedback system

Abstract

The use of online social networking services is considerably more accessible today due to advances in ICT in workplaces. Employees are spending more time on Internet engaging in non-work-related activities, such as maintaining personal networks, interacting with friends, streaming music and video, checking sports scores and following Web bookmarks by visiting various online social venues. As such, organizations are increasingly concerned about maintaining a stable workforce, and thus they make the use of monitoring systems. However, the current monitoring practices violate employees’ reasonable expectation of privacy, decrease self-determination and cause employees to complain and possibly increase intent to quit jobs. We present the use of passive monitoring in the workplace as a new tool to observe employees’ Internet activities with objective measures. Based on Self Quantified movement, we aim to design a system that can passively monitor employees, provide visualization feedback based on their Internet usage activities, and allow employees to understand the implications of their actions concerning the boundary between work-related and non-work related Internet activities.