I’m no great fan of the employee tracking business. If you think you really need to keep tabs on your employees to make them do their jobs properly, you should be looking at your own management style and employee relations.
In fact, studies have proved that these types of systems are counter-productive anyway. So any manager looking to use employee tracking is not only a poor manager by definition, he (I’m betting it’ll mainly be “he’s” unfortunately) is also stupid enough to be advertising that he can’t manage his people. How dumb is that?
We’ve also seen a few incredibly crass and insensitive remarks from the likes of cuddly Xora CEO Sanjay Shirole. Good ole Sanjay says about employees being not where they‚Äôre meant to be:
There‚Äôs no electro shock ‚Äě yet
Ha Ha. What a wit.
Quite clearly, this industry isn’t attracting the brightest or most empathetic employees, but at least no one has started talking about “virtual concentration camps” - yet. Give ‘em time though.
As if the industry couldn’t sink lower, they’ve resorted to spamming people to sell their products. Seriously, someone reckons that spamming will sell these systems to businesses. On the other hand, if their prospects are as stupid as they seem to be, maybe it’s a perfect strategy!
Here’s what they sent me. I’ve removed any ID, not to spare their blushes, but to withhold Google juice:
Dear Asset Manager, [RB sez: I'm not an Asset Manager by the way and the least they could have attempted is to personalise the thing]
Are you wondering where your drivers are?
Do you have the need to verify their routes?
Do you suspect that they are NOT showing up at the job site on time? Or maybe leaving early?[RB sez: How tacky is that? Frankly, I don't give a damn about people leaving early if they do their job properly. In fact, I'd ENCOURAGE them to leave early if they've finished for the day.]
“TRACKTACKY” is a new and innovative GPS TRACKING DEVICE that provides start / stop times, time at each job / location and will also verify your driver’s daily activity. “TRACKTACKY” is the size of a large pack of chewing gum and can be easily hidden inside the vehicle. It is battery powered, does not require any installation and can be transferred between all of your assets.
[RB sez: So it's not enough that you TELL employees that you don't trust them, this implies that prospects should track employees without their knowledge. Interesting to see how that stands up in court.]
“TRACKTACKY” is available for a low cost price with volume discounts available. There is [sic] NO MONTHLY AIRTIME fees.
Please take time to review “TRACKTACKY”. I am confident that this is an ideal low cost and cost effective [RB sez: Great! Low cost and cost effective!] alternative to knowing where your drivers and assets have been. I look forward to your positive response. Should you have any further inquiries, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Richard Dimwit
TRACKTACKY
How much lower can this industry go? Sadly, I fear it’ll find a way to sink even further.
Wow, my jaw just dropped open… The comment on “can be easily hidden inside the vehicle” is pretty, pretty bad.
You know how I feel about employee-tracking - same as you. I also realize there are benefits to the technology, but to improve “processes”, such as routing and dispatching, and in those cases tracking must be done “passively”, as I have written in my blog.
In any case, I wonder if XORA’s strategy signals that there is a lack of customers that want to track employees, because they don’t trust their employees. And thus they are just desperately looking for different ways to sell the technology - in this case, the wrong way, because it continues to be based on the assumption that the employee is “taking advantage of the employer”, vs. trying to maximize the real benefits and improve the processes.
Maybe XORA should get into the “convict ankle transceiver” space… No reason to hide transceiver in that case… Wait a minute… hm, that is an idea…
ceo
Enrique - thanks for the comment, as always.
Just to make it clear, Xora were not the company sending out the spam. This was another company, who shall remain anonymous.
Anyone else reading this, Enrique has some very useful guidelines for the use of companies considering tracking employees for legitimate reasons eg to make fleet management more efficient. Worth grabbing a copy.
Russell
Russell,
Over here in Europe there is the other side of the coin in that companies have a legal duty of care to their employees and there is a directive on supporting “lone workers” and keeping them safe. There are huge numbers of health/social workers, utility engineers, drivers etc that fall into this catagory.
I was involved in upgrading one of the biggest rollouts of mobile technology in the UK to around 12,000 British Gas engineers. They had location based services in the vans passsing LBS data over GPRS to a central dispatch area. Each device was also equipped with a panic button that send an emergency signal with location back to base. This has saved around 2-3 engineers every year who have had heart attacks, or other accidents requiring an emergency response. They key here is to actively involve the staff and unions at the beginning so that everyone goes into the system with their eyes open.
Right now the UK National Health service is running trials using GSM equipped name tags for health vistors, nurses etc that can provide a location fix when actvated back to a central monitoring point. Another version allows the user to speak a location before they enter an address. In an emergency this voice tag is transmitted to the monitoring system and police etc are called automatically.
LBS does have its place and as long as companies are open with their employees there should be no problem.
Simon
Simon - thanks for the comment.
As a passionate advocate of all types of LBS, I couldn’t agree with you more.
What this little rant was about wasn’t an attack on employee tracking per se. As you say, it can have huge benefits for employees, as well as employers.
But companies tracking employees for the wrong reasons, or rolling out in the wrong way, are going to run into trouble. And as for the concept of trying to sell these products by spam - this is absurd.
Russell
They had location based services in the vans passsing LBS data over GPRS to a central dispatch area. Each device was also equipped with a panic button that send an emergency signal with location back to base.
They are just desperately looking for different ways to sell the technology in this case, the wrong way, because it continues to be based on the assumption that the employee is taking advantage of the employer, trying to maximize the real benefits and improve the processes.
Ever wonder where one of your salespeople was — actually making a call or headed for the golf course? Well, for better or worse, soon you will probably be able to tell. There is a big-brother aspect to the whole affair, but the ability to monitor where employees carrying cell phones are and whether they are moving or sitting is on the way.
It not totally on the negative side for tracking your employees. It also benefits the company by tracking maintenance schedules and trying to save the company money. Sometimes you have to do things your employees may not like or they can also work somewhere else that also do the same if they utilize vehicles in there business. Tracking the employee can also keep them from moonlighting on the job, and I’m not saying that it would be everyone, but it’s your business that you wants to be successful. If tracking your employees or there vehicles will help keep your business running smoothly, you do what you have to do.
(spam link removed)
[...] I’m a long time fan of Location Based Services and it’s pretty hard to keep the faith - a bit like supporting a long struggling sports team, who despite occasional flashes of promise, consistently disappoint. And when an LBS service is launched, they’re often used for something dark and despicable like employee geofencing or services that I’m afraid just don’t deliver, like child tracking. (Before you write to me and say they do, please read the post I’ve linked to and respond with that in mind. A child tracking service tracks the phone, not the kid and it’s the phone that gets dumped if, horror of horrors, the child gets abducted.) [...]