Algorithmic Management: Why and How it Benefits Organizations, a Conversation with Aislinn Kelly-Lyth

Aislinn Kelly-Lyth was a researcher at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights in Oxford. M. Six Silberman and Halefom Abraha are postdoctoral researchers at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford. The Principal investigator of the iManage project is a law professor at the University of Oxford.

Human resource managers often refer to the management practices as people analysts. There is more to the monitoring software than just being installed on employees’ computers and phones. It has added a new level of surveillance to work life: location tracking; keystroke logging; screenshots of workers’ screens; and even, in some cases, video and photos taken through the webcams on workers’ computers.

It’s not hard to see why traditional organizations are using algorithmic management. The most obvious benefits have to do with improving the speed and scale of information processing. In recruiting and hiring, for example, companies can receive thousands of applications for a single open position. Screening software and other automated tools can help sort through a lot of information. In some cases, algorithmic management might help improve organizational performance, for example by more smartly pairing workers with work. There are some potential benefits that are mostly unrealized. Designed carefully, algorithmic management could reduce bias in hiring, evaluation, and promotion or improve employee well-being by detecting needs for training or support.

There are harms to workers and risks to organizations. The systems aren’t always very good and sometimes make decisions that are obviously erroneous or discriminatory. They require lots of data, which means they often occasion newly pervasive and intimate surveillance of workers, and they are often designed and deployed with relatively little worker input. The result is that sometimes they make biased or otherwise bad management decisions; they cause privacy harms; they expose organizations to regulatory and public relations risks; and they can erode trust between workers and leadership.

This can be called “datafication” or “informatisation,” according to the book, or “the practice by which every movement, either offline or online, is traced, revised and stored as necessary, for statistical, financial, commercial and electoral purposes.”

Some of the methods used to track where employees are and what they do at a given time can be used to track other things as well. Employers can use data to score workers on their productivity, or to track trends across the entire workforce.

The new tools are being rolled out not only in offices but also on the road to mobile workers such as long-haul truck drivers and Amazon warehouse workers.

The laws of the land had a difficult time keeping up with the rapid pace of these tools. In most countries, there are no laws specifically forbidding employers from, say, video-monitoring their workforce, except in places where employees should have a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” such as bathrooms or locker rooms.

In the US, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act laid out the rule that employees should not intercept employee communication, but its exceptions—that they can be intercepted to protect the privacy and rights of the employer or if business duties require it, or if the employee granted prior permission—make the law toothless and easy to get around.