Wearables, wellbeing and productivity: A digital future for industrial relations?

Dr Harry Pitts, School of Management

One thing missing from public debate over productivity is an understanding of the micro-processes that drive different productive regimes at the level of the workplace, and, more broadly, the industrial relations that support them. Under the post-war settlement, the industrial concord between workers and employers allowed the former to bargain with the latter over productivity compromises. These were based on a quantitative understanding of work, time and effort achievable due to the standardised character of the labour that took place in large, unionised industries and the standardised systems of measurement that followed.

The contemporary political economy of the UK, meanwhile, is characterised by a very different set of circumstances: deindustrialisation and the rise of the service sector, the decline of trade unions and social democracy and the de-standardisation of employment relations towards a proliferation of precarious working patterns. All these contribute to work regimes that seemingly render unreproducible the kinds of measurement- of bits rolling off a production line in a given period of time- upon which workers once bargained for better, and on which the productivity of the UK thrived.

Meanwhile, the use of distributed technologies of data capture and analysis increasingly characterise the changing world of work. In diverse contexts - the platform economy, warehousing and logistics, the hybrid spaces of creative and freelance work - individual behaviour is measured, monitored and predicted by sensors, apps and algorithms. Whether as a tool of managerial control or as a means of ensuring personal productivity and wellbeing, this 'quantification of the self' is both socially individualised and performatively individualising. Management use wearable tech and other means of data capture to identify sub-optimal individual performance among the workforce. Meanwhile, individuals themselves deploy the same or similar tech to develop healthier and more productive working practices inside and outside the workplace.

Take, for instance, the productivity mantras that characterise Silicon Valley-style workplaces, whose own search for self-measurement and time management seeks the optimization of working time with life itself. Dutifully recording how time is spent so as to use it better, this quantifies the unquantified and makes it measurable. This measurement, at one and the same time as constructing an iron cage of rationality, makes possible struggle over the extent of what is measured. The ceaseless self-quantification of the ‘productivity ninja’ holds out the possibility that workers could harness new means of measuring their efficiency and increasing their time on the job to achieve the opposite: measurement in the name of less and better work, not more and worse. Where work can be quantified, it can also be contested, and its gains better redistributed through wage and productivity bargains struck with employers.

In this respect at least, the Silicon Valley culture of self-quantification may offer something for workers in search of quantitative basis upon which to stake claims upon time and value. The question is whether its increasingly powerful cultural and economic hegemony makes any of its potentialities tangible for wider bodies of workers, instead of just a means for their increased domination and control. The potential is there not only for a greater understanding of the physical and affective impacts of contemporary work but a framework of bargaining over the terms under which that work is performed and remunerated in a world where clear measures and values of one’s work and its worth are increasingly abstract and out of reach.

There is always a dual character to measurement in the workplace. It can be used by management to dominate workers but can also be used by those same workers to organise around and negotiate improvements in programmes of concerted collective bargaining. Shared forms of measurement present in the industrial workplace – such as the managerial clipboard of the Taylorist factory – saw established forms of measure used to both dominate workers and by those same workers to organise around and negotiate improvements in programmes of concerted collective bargaining. In this sense they represented a common, if contested, basis around which management and workforces could construct industrial compromises around time and productivity. But the fragmented and deregulated contemporary workplace often lacks clear frameworks of measure around which new compromises can be struck in pursuit of productivity gains and better working practices.

If the Silicon Valley self-masters, utilizing wearables to optimize their time and effort, do offer a road forward in a world with few other options, the crucial question is how to collectivise what is currently a process of individualised and individualising commodification and control. The shared ‘curation’ of data may be one way to institutionalise a capacity for the data of quantification and self-quantification to be turned to the ends of a 'workers inquiry' centring on what some scholars have called 'sousveillance': the bottom-up ability to monitor managerial practices against and not in support of exploitation and domination in the workplace.

In collaboration with Human Computer Interaction scholars and artists working at the intersection of technology and the human body, my current work explores the collective dimension concealed in the individualised subjectivity that self-quantification projects. Funded by the ESRC Productivity Insights Network and, previously, the Brigstow Institute, I am interested in investigation whether and how new collective practices of shared aggregation and curation of individual data stand to enrich our understanding of the physical and emotional impacts of work and undergird coordinated responses to contemporary societal and industrial challenges around wellbeing and productivity in the workplace and beyond.