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Good Intentions, Bad Inventions: How Employees Judge Pervasive Technologies in the Workplace
Marios Constantinides, Daniele Quercia
October 12, 2022
IEEE pervasive computing
28 citations
Key Takeaways
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Employee judgments of workplace monitoring technologies depend on three key factors, in order of importance: whether the technology builds on existing tools, whether it actually fits the job purpose without interfering with work, and critically, whether it respects individual rights and causes no harm. The study of 131 crowd-workers evaluating 16 productivity-tracking technologies found that the third factor—protecting employee rights—was most influential in determining whether a technology was deemed acceptable.
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Making AI systems more accurate or invisible is not enough to make them acceptable in the workplace. The research suggests that current technology design focuses on technical improvements and seamless integration, but this approach misses the ethical dimensions that employees actually care about. Responsible AI design requires explicitly considering ethics alongside engineering.
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Workplace monitoring technologies face a legitimacy problem that goes beyond technical performance. Even well-intentioned productivity tools are frequently judged as invasive by employees. This gap between employer intent and employee perception suggests that organizations cannot assume surveillance technologies will be accepted simply because they improve efficiency—they must address underlying concerns about rights and autonomy.
Abstract
Pervasive technologies combined with powerful AI have been recently introduced to enhance work productivity. Yet, some of these technologies are judged to be invasive. To identify which ones, we should understand how employees tend to judge these technologies. We considered 16 technologies that track productivity, and conducted a study in which 131 crowd-workers judged these scenarios. We found that a technology was judged to be right depending on the following three aspects of increasing importance. That is, whether the technology: 1) was currently supported by existing tools; 2) did not interfere with work or was fit for purpose; and 3) did not cause any harm or did not infringe on any individual rights. Ubicomp research currently focuses on how to design better technologies by making them more accurate, or by increasingly blending them into the background. It might be time to design better ubiquitous technologies by unpacking AI ethics as well.