“When a consultant comes into a company, they look at org charts and do interviews,’’ said Ben Waber, chief executive of Sociometric Solutions and a senior researcher at Harvard Business School. “But our approach is to use these sensors to see how people really interact, over a period of a month or two.’’
They are especially useful, Waber said, for tracking informal communications people might not report in an interview, such as a conversation in a cafeteria line. “Surveys and interviews are just bad at getting information about sporadic interactions,’’ he said.
And human interaction is a big factor in all sorts of organizational initiatives, product development, and mergers. The device, developed at the MIT Media Lab, was used in 2009 by a Bank of America call center in Rhode Island. They found that call center workers who interacted more with their colleagues felt less stressed, handled calls more quickly, but had equivalent customer approval ratings to those who did not interact as much.
Forbes magazine observed: “Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers’ e-mailed instructions.’’
As a result, the bank scheduled employees’ breaks so they could talk more often with one another, rather than less; previously, their breaks had been staggered.
Combined with information about who e-mails whom, data the badges generate about interpersonal interaction can highlight who spreads information and who the experts are on given topics.
It’s also a way to show which departments don’t tend to communicate with other departments, Waber said. Working with a bank in Germany, the company noticed that people often did not talk face-to-face with customer service staffers - until a new product ran into problems.
Waber said that when Sociometric Solutions works with a company, wearing the badges is voluntary, but more than 90 percent of employees usually participate. The devices need to be recharged daily.
