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At Cisco Live 2021, Cisco announced enhancements to People Insights, a feature in its Webex platform. The enhancements monitor employee behavior in meetings and inter-office collaboration. The goal, according to Cisco, is to “increase and promote personal well-being.”
To me it sounds like employee surveillance disguised with the gauzy language of the wellness industry.
I See You
The latest capabilities in People Insights monitor your meeting behaviors. These behaviors include:
- How often you share your camera
- Whether you multi-task during a meeting
- Whether you show up on time
- How often you speak up
Cisco says users can set personal preferences to track these behaviors, with the goal of improving their time management and work-life integration. These behaviors will be surfaced up via a Personal Insights view, which shows daily trends of how well employees are meeting the goals they set.
Furthermore, Cisco insists that these Personal Insights are private, and available only to individual employees–not to managers, and not to bosses.
Some of the things Personal Insights measures seem kind of useful, like how many meeting invites you accept but don’t attend, and how many meetings are held outside work hours or during your own designated “focus time.”
These are useful because the number of meetings and when they’re scheduled are often outside the control of an individual employee. If the boss says “The meeting’s at 4:30 pm”, it doesn’t matter if that’s your “focus time”, or that 4:30 pm for the boss is 7:30 pm for you.
If managers or executives get a clearer picture of the meeting minefields they are laying for employees, maybe they’d re-evaulate how they schedule their days.
This Is Getting Personal
Yet many of other behaviors being tracked–multi-tasking, camera-sharing, participation–put the onus on the individual. These metrics seem to ask: Are you a team player? Are you fully engaged? Are you perhaps not contributing like you should?
Sometimes you don’t want the camera on because you’re sharing an office with a spouse, or working from your bedroom, or there’s a three-year-old having a tantrum in the background. Sometimes you just need an effing break from the panopticon.
Research shows that video meetings increase users’ cognitive loads, cause fatigue, and ramp up social anxiety. Adding always-on surveillance could pile on the stress. How much cognitive energy will employees waste worrying about their Insights progress?
Personalized metrics may also create perverse incentives. For example, if employees know they’re being measured on how often they speak up, that’s an incentive to talk more. As everyone knows, more talking doesn’t automatically mean better meetings.
Never Mind Privacy Controls. Just Don’t Collect It
Cisco’s press release expresses a commitment to end user privacy multiple times, including the claim that the Personal Insights view is “…underpinned with privacy and security to ensure this information is only available to you.”
It worries me that CIsco feels the need to insist, over and over, that these enhancements aren’t a privacy problem.
But let’s give Cisco the benefit of the doubt and assume there’s no way that an administrator with root privileges can get access to an individual’s Insights, or that these metrics couldn’t be extracted via APIs.
Collecting the data in the first place is still a problem. There’s nothing to stop a manager from instructing direct reports to screenshot their Personal Insights view and mail it to them once a day or once a week. If a Fortune 100 customer asks Cisco to make Personal Insights available to its HR team and top managers, is Cisco really going to say no?
In fairness to Cisco, the solution also includes a Team Insights feature that provides an anonymized, team-wide view of “connections, collaboration habits, and work-life integration for the entire team” and a similar “bird’s eye” view for the whole organization. I presume Cisco would argue that these views will be sufficient for managers and executives.
I think that’s naive. If you gather individualized employee behavior, even when couched as a private wellness tool, other people in the business will want to see it.
Managers will definitely want to see it, whether out of genuine interest in a team’s mental health, or personal curiosity, or animosity, or because they need to justify their existence by poring over productivity metrics.
Business people fetishize analytics and “data-driven decision-making,” so it seems foolish of Cisco to collect a tranche of data about a customer’s employees and then tell the business owner they can’t have it.
It’s nice that Cisco wants to foster a more humane workplace. Building layers of surveillance isn’t the way to do it. People aren’t metrics, and can’t be reduced to an Insight or score (although Amazon is making a go of it with warehouse workers).
I think Cisco has good intentions with the Personal Insights view, but we know where good intentions get us. If Cisco really takes end-user wellness seriously, it should kill this feature.
About Drew Conry-Murray:Drew Conry-Murray has been writing about information technology for more than 15 years, with an emphasis on networking, security, and cloud. He's co-host of The Network Break podcast and a Tech Field Day delegate. He loves real tea and virtual donuts, and is delighted that his job lets him talk with so many smart, passionate people. He writes novels in his spare time.
