Desk Sensors To Monitor Employees Installed at Barclays

The London bank has installed devices that show when desks are unoccupied and how often they are used.
Management were bombarded with questions about the devices after they first appeared under employees desks. They turned out to be tracking devices called OccupEye, which use heat and motion sensors to record how long employees are spending at their posts.

The bank reportedly didn’t neglect to inform employees ahead of time although Barclays staff said they don’t remember being informed about the boxes, but a spokesperson for the bank who leaked the story to Bloomberg said there have been no official human-resources complaints.

These devices are pitched as a way for companies to find out how they can reduce office space, providing a multicolored dashboard to show managers which workstations are unoccupied and analyse usage trends. According to Barclays the sensors aren’t monitoring people or their productivity; they are assessing office space usage, the bank said in an emailed statement. “This sort of analysis helps us to reduce costs, for example, managing energy consumption, or identifying opportunities to further adopt flexible work environments.”

Research conducted at CEB (now Gartner) last year found that many employees actually don’t mind being monitored by their employers, but substantial minorities do have mixed feelings or consider certain forms of monitoring unacceptable.