Employers have more data about their employees than ever before. Nearly all work is conducted through technologies that leave digital traces (such as call logs, email activity, and reports of keystrokes) as by-products of work. Organizations increasingly use these data to monitor employee performance and make predictions about their motivations and behaviors. However, the data representations that are constructed based on such data are often crude proxies that may misrepresent workers and their actual work practices, leading to them being unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged by the use of such data for (behavioral) predictions. The proposed research investigates employee monitoring practices and data representations answering two questions: 1) How do workers and managers interpret the data representations of workers, and 2) what are the consequences for employees of monitoring their digital traces?

2023

2027