Tech CEOs want to take your work performance data public

The Future. A plausible world where worker performance is tracked from one job to the next may sound crazy (or even dystopian) to some, but it shines a light on how the tech industry may look to quantify employee performance in a post-pandemic world. Cue the theme song to Black Mirror…

Yikes
Auren Hoffman, the CEO of Safegraph and the host of the World of DaaS podcast, recently discussed a controversial idea during an interview with Charlie Youakim.

The two proposed a future where worker performance would be tracked from job to job via a shareable database… forever. Seems like an evolution of a growing trend of companies obsessed with tracking employee performance.

• Coinbase recently introduced a system that has employees rating each other.
• Workday, Lattice & CultureAmp are used by thousands of companies for employee reviews & HR deliverables.

The list goes on, but this particular technology would go one step further and reveal sensitive information about your work history and allow anyone to see it.

Eliminate bias
Many HR professionals have denounced the idea, but others see it as an opportunity to improve hiring and eliminate bias. And bias in hiring is one problem companies everywhere are looking to fix. That said, a numerical system that tracks you at every job you’ve ever had might be dead on arrival.

Dave Carhart, vice president of Lattice Advisory Services, a division of Lattice, mentions, “Not all companies judge success and failure, good performance and poor performance, in the same way. They also aren’t measuring employees in the same way, on the same scale, or tracking the same metrics.”

Btw, Google agrees. And Carhart also goes on to say that performance should be aligned with company culture, management quality, and growth opportunities. Many hope we keep it that way.