Biometrics in the enterprise: how organisations are tracking employees with wearables and beacons

Enterprises are increasingly turning to wearable fitness trackers to track the success of their corporate wellness programmes. ABI Research predicts that by 2020 44 million workplace wearable devices will be integrated into wellness programmes.

In a bid to attract more corporate customer the popular wearable device manufacturer Fitbit offers its own Group Health programme in three tiers for corporate clients like Diageo, Autodesk and Box.

One of the few published enterprise case studies involved BP trialling Fitbits with its North American employees to encourage a healthier lifestyle back in 2014. It reported such impressive results as an 8.6 percent decline in health risks, and a reduction in overall healthcare spend of 3.5 percent.

Businesses can use sensor technology to monitor desk time for employees so that organisations can see workspace utilisation data.

This sort of tracking caused a stir in the UK press last year when Daily Telegraph journalists objected to their desk time being monitored in the workplace.

Part of the issue here was around consent. According to Buzzfeed the staff were not asked for consent to be monitored at their desk and only discovered what the devices were after "googling the brand name and discovered they were wireless motion detectors produced by a company called OccupEye that monitor whether individuals are using their desks."

Humanyze is an MIT spinout that supplies badges and software to organisations that want to understand how their employees interact with one another in the physical world. It provide badges which look like a normal employee ID badge but is equipped with RFID and NFC sensors, bluetooth for proximity sensing, infrared to detect face to face interaction, an accelerometer and two microphones. The badges 'talk' to beacons set up around the office to detect proximity.

The microphones only monitor tone and volume, not content. CEO Ben Waber told our sister title Techworld that everything is processed in real time and nothing is recorded, because "from a privacy perspective it is the wrong thing to do," he said.

The company then combines this physical world data with data from work systems (primarily Microsoft) to pull in calendar and email usage data, not content. By combining this digital communications data with data from the physical world managers using Humanyze dashboards can get a "holistic view of what goes on in the company", Waber says. Managers can start to see how they spread their time between people, how different teams talk to one another, if meetings are inclusive enough and how cohesive groups are.

Employees can also access their own personal dashboards to see "what you do, how you compare to  the team average. If you want a different role you can look at what they do. You can start to see how you compare, so benchmarking within your company."

LinkedIn and Stanford University’s mind and body lab collaborated with the makers of a wearable breathing tracker called Spire to prove that "workers who wore a Spire tracker -- a small, pebble-sized device that clips to a belt buckle or bra strap -- experienced significantly less stress and negative moods, as well as more productive and “focused” work hours than non-Spire users," the press release reads.

LinkedIn’s global wellness manager, Michael Susi, said they "used Spire to make tangible improvements to things that can seem fleeting: focus, distraction, and productivity. Lowering stress while increasing productivity is crucial to the success of any business, and to be able to do both of those with one device is rather powerful.”

According to the Stoddard Review report 'The Workplace Advantage', Amsterdam office building The Edge, which counts Deloitte as its main tenant, allocates resources like light and temperature depending on the personal preference of employees.

The report continues: “Deloitte constantly collects data on how staff inside the building interact with each other. A central dashboard tracks everything from energy use to coffee machine performance. This means that when fewer staff are expected on certain days, whole offices can be closed down, minimising heating and lighting costs. While data collation is part of the equation, so too is the need for human behaviour to be as adaptive.”

Vendors like HYPR install biometric security for Fortune 500 companies for remote login using fingerprint, voice, face and eye recognition.

Microsoft has also talked about enterprise biometrics for a couple of years now, and Office Hello allows IT teams to integrate biometrics as part of the two-factor authentication process.

There are various independent vendors that manufacture time and attendance systems which use various biometric markers, including fingerprint readers or ID badges, to avoid costly “buddy clocking” in workplaces where employees are required to clock in and out on time.