The Spy Who Fired Me: The human costs of workplace monitoring
Last March, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBCs Mad Money, devoted part of his show to a company called Cornerstone OnDemand. Cornerstone, Cramer shouted at the camera, is a cloud-based-software-as-a-service play in the talent-management field. Companies that use its platform can quickly assess an employees performance by analyzing his or her online interactions, including emails, instant messages, and Web use. Weve been managing people exactly the same way for the last hundred and fifty years, Cornerstones CEO, Adam Miller, told Cramer. With the rise of the global workforce, the remote workforce, the smartphone and the tablet, its time to manage people differently. Clients include Virgin Media, Barclays, and Starwood Hotels.
Cornerstone, as Miller likes to tell investors, is positioning itself to be on the vanguard of big data in the cloud and a leader in the gamification of performance management. To be assessed by Cornerstone is to have your collaborative partnerships scored as assets and your brainstorms rewarded with electronic badges (genius idea!). It is to have scads of information swept up about what you do each day, whom you communicate with, and what you communicate about. Cornerstone converts that data into metrics to be factored in to your performance reviews and decisions about how much youll be paid.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/03/the-spy-who-fired-me/