Jamie

  • Section 1
  • Alumni

Submitted

Unionization at Amazon and the future of employee surveillance
Jamie
Posted on April 12, 2021 at 6:18 pm
All eyes were on Bessemer, Alabama this week, as workers at Amazon’s warehouse voted on whether or not they would unionize. Although the historic attempt was defeated, the demands made by union proponents raise broader questions around the future of [...]

Activity Feed

On April 14, 2021, Jamie commented on Should your employer care how much sleep you’re getting? :

I agree with your points around the leaderboard and public availability of biometric data being risky. Even with the best of intentions at play, one can envision a number of dangerous outcomes when publicly gamifying wellness. At diverse organizations, the lives of individuals will inherently vary substantially, and it is not always a fair comparison to compare biometric data apples-to-apples.

I like Korn’s suggestion around anonymizing data and looking at trends from groups and teams rather than individual scores. For me personally, I would find it more valuable to know if I am falling behind 80% of my office in terms of sleep targets than to know that XYZ person has slept 8 hours every day. By utilizing trend data, you can better anonymize personal information while also offering potentially more valuable benchmarks against which I can compare my own wellness targets and improvements.

On April 14, 2021, Jamie commented on Narrative risks and the curse of the “10%” answer :

This really hits home for me. As someone who hates being wrong, I often struggle with the tension of changing my mind once I’ve established a hypothesis or have started building out a storyline that I don’t want to change as we learn more information. This reminds me of a book I recently read by Adam Grant, called Think Again. He talks a lot about the difficulty in changing people’s minds and helping them understand what they “don’t know” even if they think they already know the answer. I wonder if, in practice, there is a way to celebrate the moments where we break away and disprove hypotheses. If we can normalize changing answers and evolving storylines in the workplace, perhaps we can lessen some of the unconscious tension driving us to want to go full-speed ahead with only early, half-baked analysis

On April 14, 2021, Jamie commented on Debugging the Pulse Check Survey :

This is a super interesting question! I personally have had varying experiences with pulse check surveys on various consulting projects. While the data can be more or less useful, I think what’s most relevant is the discussions they are driving. For me, the most effective pulse check surveys were the ones that were then discussed in person, with the entire team (leadership included) present. These conversations were often action-oriented, focusing on how we as individuals, and as a team could foster improvements. The least effective were those where no actions followed. If you’ve ever been on a team that has consistently negative pulse check results, but nothing ever really changes, you surely can recall how painful that feels. For me, then, it’s not a question of whether a pulse check survey is the right tool or not, but how we can better integrate the results of pulse check surveys into our team conversations, and actionable paths for improvement.