In a back street in San Francisco’s start-up dominated SoMa district, a rapidly growing business is busy studying how millions of employees behave each day. Its computers know in real time why a worker was hired, how productive they are and can even follow them as they move to a new job.
Evolv is a leader in the nascent Quantified Workplace movement, where big data analytics companies are springing up to measure how we work. “Every week we figure out more things to track,” says Max Simkoff, Evolv’s co-founder and chief executive, who claims it can help improve productivity by at least 5 per cent in two-thirds of jobs.
More than half of human resources departments around the world report an increase in the use of data analytics compared with three years ago, according to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit. But many employees are still blissfully unaware of how information they may deem private is being analysed by their managers.