Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Build Gen Z's Engagement, Confidence, and Skills

When I was 22 years old, I was struggling mightily in my first job out of college. Even as a high achieving student, I had no idea how to behave in the business world, and despite valiant efforts, I was not successful.

It was hard enough learning the rules when I was physically surrounded by people willing and able to indoctrinate me, and I can’t help but feel for the Generation Z-ers (born 1996-2012) who are launching their careers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

These young professionals are trying to assess responsibilities and expectations in an environment where everyone is behind a screen, scattered around the world.

Gen Z may be digitally adept, but they’ve been prevented from observing a lot of behavior in person, and as such, can’t absorb the nuances of work as easily. It’s one thing to work remotely when you already know how the business world operates and can use established relationships to figure out any ambiguities.

My suspicion is that failing to understand and address this will affect companies’ ability to keep their Gen Z talent, and these young workers will seek out companies that better support them.

I tested this assumption against a recent global Gen Z workforce study from consumer software firm Adobe. The survey of 3,400 workers indicated that more than half of Gen Z employees intend to pursue a new job in the next year – a higher percentage than any other generation. It also found that Gen Z is the least satisfied generation at work, with only 56% satisfied with work/life balance and 59% with their jobs overall.

The pandemic certainly isn’t the only story here. According to a Western Governors University study released just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gen Z was already suffering. At that time, only 45% of Gen Z-ers said their mental health was good or excellent. That’s significantly lower than the next closest generation, millennials. Thirty-seven percent of Gen Z-ers also reported that they received help from a psychologist or mental health expert – more than any other generation.

While it’s not an employer’s responsibility to solve all of Gen Z’s problems, work-related isolation doesn’t help their cause, and well-placed intervention can go a long way in attracting and keeping young talent.

By combining our knowledge about the temperament and preferences of this generation with the high tech/high touch capabilities of human capital management software, you can rally your junior level employees to higher productivity and engagement.

 

Gen Z strategy 1: Enhanced onboarding

Communicate actively with young professional hires between the offer letter and start date. Do not give them time to regret their decision or change their minds, and instead send targeted, friendly messages expressing your enthusiasm that they’re joining the team. The right employee onboarding software can help support organic interactions and introduce new Gen Z hires to your culture, right from their first day.

When they do come aboard, make sure your orientation schedule and materials are customized to the person and the role. For instance, many Gen Z-ers prefer a one-on-one manager chat and team intros to a generic “about the business” program and would rather consume short video clips via a tech-driven employee onboarding software over a massive employee handbook.

Digitize your paperwork and, keeping in mind diversity and inclusion best practices, put together a roster of topics and expectations to cover that are specific to young professionals. This roster may include areas you think are common sense (e.g. the importance of arriving on time to meetings, the appropriate language to use when texting or emailing a client), but these norms might not be universal across cultures, and Gen Z’s experience with them might be limited.

Work with new hires’ managers to set their goals and learning cadence and build in weekly (if not daily) check-ins to assess how Gen Z-ers are feeling.

Gen Z strategy 2: Flexible scheduling

Many Gen Z-ers have never had to commute to a building and work in an office for a set number of hours every day. Especially when their safety and convenience are at stake, your Gen Z-ers may balk if an employer mandates staff back to the office without good reason.

Engage in employee listening strategies, from official pulse surveys to informal text chats, and ascertain the type of work arrangement that works best for your staff in various cultures and locations. Then, allow individual employees as much control as possible in determining their hours and environment. A hybrid work model can go a long way toward Gen Z employee retention and engagement.

For the rest of the article, head over to the Ceridian blog.

How to Make the Most of Your DEI Initiatives

For most organizations, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals are aspirational. Businesses, and the leaders within them, want to be as inclusive as possible. However, they often languish at the stage of simply getting a diverse group of employees into the room.

In Ceridian’s 2022 Pulse of Talent survey of more than 6,800 workers from around the globe, we see some positive news about the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace today. Fifty-four percent of respondents described their organizations as very or extremely diverse, and only 2% said their organizations aren’t diverse at all. Sixty-eight percent rated their employers as being good or excellent at fostering a culture of belonging.

However, there is still room for improvement. Just over half (53%) of this year’s Pulse of Talent respondents said their organizations are committed to addressing inequities in the workplace, and only 49% reported knowing that their employer has a DEI strategy.

Of those respondents who said their organizations have a DEI strategy, less than one-third (32%) felt they are making progress towards diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Only 14% said their employers are leaders in DEI.

This data may indicate that efforts to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace are occurring behind the scenes but aren’t impacting the employee experience.

Also of note in the latest Pulse of Talent survey findings is that an overall lack of alignment between employer and employee values – which may include DEI – is driving some turnover. Twenty percent of respondents who are seeking a new job cite it as the reason they’re leaving.

So, how can employers move beyond just paying lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and ensure their DEI initiatives have a meaningful impact on their workforce and culture? Here are five tips.

Set appropriate DEI metrics

Unfortunately, some efforts aimed at achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace are undertaken for optics, with little intention to change an organization’s culture. But DEI programs are only as valuable as the degree to which they sufficiently motivate a diverse group of employees to join and stay with your company, which means accurate progress tracking is essential.

Many organizations already have representation metrics, meaning they measure whether the number of diverse employees in a department or job level is suitable given overall demographics. However, your DEI initiatives should also move the needle on metrics such as a diverse group of employees interviewed, a diverse group of employees promoted, a diverse group of employees retained within the company, and a diverse group of employees in senior leadership positions.

Perform a DEI analysis

Here’s where employee listening, or the process by which you capture and understand the employee experience, can get you started on taking your DEI initiatives to the next level.

Just because you’ve taken actions to focus on DEI or set up employee resource groups (ERGs) or committees already doesn’t mean you shouldn’t regularly revisit your strategy. You can engage a third-party expert to perform a DEI analysis to understand how various programs, messaging, and measurement techniques fit together and where you stand compared to your competitors.

People analytics platforms can also help you understand what marginalized groups experience throughout your employee lifecycle and identify any issues, how these came about, and what to do about them.

Your best source of information, however, may come from asking people directly. By surveying or interviewing diverse employees about what they think of workplace DEI efforts to date and what else they feel needs to be done, you will gain a more accurate picture of the true impact of your efforts.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the Ceridian blog.

Pre-empt the Great Resignation with Creative Sourcing

By now, most everyone in human capital and workforce circles has heard the term “Great Resignation.” The general idea is this: as the economy improves and companies are mandating that employees head back to the office, disengaged workers who have stayed put through the pandemic are taking the leap. In fact, according to the 2021 Microsoft Work Trend Index, 41% of employees are planning to leave their current job within a year.

Over the next year or two, we can expect the current employer’s market to evolve into a job seeker’s market, especially for seasoned employees in hot industries. This means that no matter how prestigious your employer brand, or how desirable your positions are, you may find yourself at a loss for talent.

The obvious way to pre-empt the Great Resignation is by improving the experience you’re offering to current employees. However, talent acquisition is an essential piece of the puzzle, and if you recruit the way you’ve always recruited – for example, insisting on candidates who check two dozen specific boxes or who graduated from the “best” universities – your hiring process is likely to drag on far longer than it needs to. And this, in turn, negatively impacts the employee experience for current employees who are doing more with less.
Let’s look at a few creative sourcing strategies through which you are most likely to interface with passive candidates who are the best fit for your organization.

Contact people who started a new job during the pandemic.

I heard this one in a recent HR expert roundtable, and it makes a lot of sense. Combine the fact that many companies have been terrible at onboarding during COVID-19 with the notion that employees are most likely to quit a job in the first three months, and you have a whole lot of good people sitting on LinkedIn wishing they’d made a different choice. Talk to them. You never know what you might find out.

Don’t insist on FTEs or local candidates.

Are you sure you require someone full-time and/or someone who lives close to headquarters? Because when you insist on these two things, you narrow your candidate pool considerably. Contract workers especially are so common now that the U.S. government even addresses them on the W4 form. I encourage you to consider whether a given job can be done just as easily by a worker in another state, or one who earns money another way when you don’t need them.

Join an industry guild or association.

This is admittedly not a new sourcing tip for me, but after joining several groups over the last few years, I’ve personally realized its power. Through my associations with the Grey Swan Guild, the Future Today Institute, and the Association of Professional Futurists, I’ve casually met enough talented futurists to fill my collaboration cup for the rest of my career.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Don’t Be a Victim of the Great Resignation

By now, you’ve likely heard the term “the great resignation.” Anthony Klotz, a professor at Texas A&M University, coined the term in a May Bloomberg article to refer to the great numbers of workers expected to exit the workforce after the pandemic.

Klotz does his own research, but a recent Microsoft study, the 2021 Work Trend Index, mirrored his findings. Microsoft surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries and analyzed trillions of productivity and labor signals across LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 to forecast the pending workforce departures.

According to Microsoft, over 40 percent of the global workforce are considering leaving their employer this year, 46 percent are planning to make a major pivot or transition, and only 38 percent of employees are thriving in their careers right now. The situation is worse for women. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2020 study found that one in three working mothers have considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers because of COVID-19.

The Microsoft and McKinsey data suggest that the pandemic led employees to question their priorities and either transition to work they found more meaningful or decrease the focus on their job generally. But while this was certainly a factor, new data from Stanford University illustrated that how companies treated their employees also played a significant role.

According to Stanford, the pandemic had a cascading effect on organizations with unsupportive cultures. Companies that had historically laid people off, decreased compensation, held back promotions, or sacrificed psychological safety to preserve the bottom line engaged in more of these behaviors during COVID-19. Stressed-out employees who might have been disgruntled before were downright disgusted. And now they’re ready to quit.

Interestingly, food service, hospitality and retail – some of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic – are experiencing the most resignations. A “We Quit” sign left on the door of a Nebraska Burger King restaurant after the entire staff walked out really said it all.

For more, check out the full piece on the SilkRoad blog.

Don't Be a Victim of the Great Resignation

By now, you’ve likely heard the term “the great resignation.” Anthony Klotz, a professor at Texas A&M University, coined the term in a May Bloomberg article to refer to the great numbers of workers expected to exit the workforce after the pandemic.

Klotz does his own research, but a recent Microsoft study, the 2021 Work Trend Index, mirrored his findings. Microsoft surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries and analyzed trillions of productivity and labor signals across LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 to forecast the pending workforce departures.

According to Microsoft, over 40 percent of the global workforce are considering leaving their employer this year, 46 percent are planning to make a major pivot or transition, and only 38 percent of employees are thriving in their careers right now. The situation is worse for women. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2020 study found that one in three working mothers have considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers because of COVID-19.

The Microsoft and McKinsey data suggest that the pandemic led employees to question their priorities and either transition to work they found more meaningful or decrease the focus on their job generally. But while this was certainly a factor, new data from Stanford University illustrated that how companies treated their employees also played a significant role.

According to Stanford, the pandemic had a cascading effect on organizations with unsupportive cultures. Companies that had historically laid people off, decreased compensation, held back promotions, or sacrificed psychological safety to preserve the bottom line engaged in more of these behaviors during COVID-19. Stressed-out employees who might have been disgruntled before were downright disgusted. And now they’re ready to quit.

Interestingly, food service, hospitality and retail – some of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic – are experiencing the most resignations. A “We Quit” sign left on the door of a Nebraska Burger King restaurant after the entire staff walked out really said it all.

As reported by the Washington Post in June, 649,000 retail workers put in their notice in April, the industry’s largest one-month exodus since the Labor Department began tracking this data more than 20 years ago.

The so-called “great resignation” will collide with other demographic factors impacting who is available to work and where – including baby boomer retirement, a small population of midlife employees, and a young worker population plagued by stalled education and career growth. If this doesn’t point to a coming labor shortage, I don’t know what does.

If you’re an HR professional or manager, is there anything you can do to avoid becoming a victim? The answer is yes, and it starts with self-awareness of common employer blind spots.

Want to learn more? Catch the replay of my webinar on HR blind spots with SilkRoad!

 

A Futurist's View of the Post-Pandemic Workforce

Given that I wrote a book about the rapid transformation of work as we knew it back in 2018, people often ask me what has surprised me about how human capital is evolving today. As a Workforce Institute Board Member, I’d like to share my topline thoughts, some of which have been derived as the result of quantitative research, and others which came about through engagement with organizations and futurist groups such as the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), the Future Today Institute, the Grey Swan Guild, and the foresight certification program I recently completed with the University of Houston.

The Acceleration of What We Saw Coming

Pandemic or no pandemic, several workforce-related trends were inevitable, including the rise of the gig economy, the contract workforce, internal talent marketplaces, and talent assembly – in which teams are constructed from different types of workers to solve specific problems in hot areas of the business.

We also surmised that organizations would begin to look closely at how human capital quantitatively drives businessvalue; the use of Big Data, analytics, and executive dashboards to determine what is and isn’t working in talent acquisition, learning, scheduling, and performance; the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to combat unconscious bias and measure productivity; and the focus on data quality, integration, and governance.

The shift in the flow of work due to new players like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon entering the online collaboration market was expected, as was theincreasing popularity of curated learning content by in-house subject matter experts, personalized course recommendations, and targeted certifications and microcredentialing. Given the technology available today, there is no reason individuals shouldn’t upskill and reskill using all the resources at their disposal, and at their own pace and convenience.

What Has Surprised Me

There have been a few head scratchers along the way. The first involves digital transformation. It is a bit disappointing how, during the pandemic, some organizations have simply slapped in-office processes up online. That was fine for the first six months of the crisis, but now it’s time to move on. One size doesn’t fit all. We must permanently adapt certain processes to be antifragile and an effective mix of high tech, high touch.

Also, with respect to digital transformation, it surprises me that no one is talking about what we’ll do when we are entirely dependent on technology and it breaks, what happens when it gets seriously hacked, what happens when we have bandwidth challenges and access inequity, what happens when there are too many systems and usability and adoption falter, and what data and privacy concerns will arise with increased employee monitoring. In my opinion, these are issues that every company should be closely tracking.

While the labor shortages occurring as a result of demographic shifts like baby boomer retirement and smaller generational cohorts like X and Z were anticipated, organizational attitudes toward post-pandemic employee retention are not. Many companies are currently issuing decrees about exactly when people should return to the office and how and when they should work. After a successful 18-month trial of much greater flexibility, this is not going to fly with top (and increasingly rare) talent, and I fear a “great resignation” is about to take place.

Finally, I’m perplexed that more leaders aren’t acknowledging that they were caught completely off guard by the pandemic and are now engaging in strategic foresight to be adequately prepared for what’s certain to be future disruptions.

While we can’t predict the future, we have a responsibility to look around corners as best we can and plan for a variety of potential scenarios. I look forward to continuing to be part of this process!

This post was originally published on the Workforce Institute blog.

Building Your First Reskilling Strategy

According to a not-yet-published research study by Chief Learning Officer and DeVry University, only half of leaders feel their organization’s learning strategy is properly aligned to their business strategy.

In last week’s webinar with SilkRoad, I discussed why upskilling and reskilling are so important in the post-COVID era. As you’ll recall, upskilling provides new skills to workers in their existing domains, while reskilling trains workers for new jobs.

Whether your strategy involves upskilling, reskilling, or a combination of both, the first step in creating it is ensuring business objective alignment.

An aligned learning strategy includes an established process for mapping learning initiatives to business goals and outcomes.

In contrast, an unaligned learning strategy is piecemeal or ad hoc, with little consideration of overarching company objectives. In other words, someone in the business or in L&D said: “We should do a training on that” and someone else said, “sure, let’s make it happen!”

Eight Steps to Reskilling Proficiency

Alignment sounds good, but how do you achieve it in reality?

1. If you’re an L&D professional, sitting in on c-suite meetings and/or getting briefed on executive plans in real-time is a terrific start.
2. You might also try embedding members of your team in business units so you know immediately what roles or skills you need to upskill and reskill FOR.
3. Next, map the identified workforce needs against the competencies your employees currently possess.
4. Convene a task force to outline jobs that are mission-critical for organizational growth and assess whether any of these roles can be redesigned, reconfigured, or combined.
5. Use strategic automation, or determining where human and machine labor best fit, and match resources to tasks.  When plugging in human labor, don’t forget about contract workers, subject matter experts, and anyone else with an alternative work arrangement.
6. If you’ve determined that your human workforce has skills gaps, next you’ll need to determine the best way to address those. Fortunately, there are endless external training resources to supplement internal ones and developing learning content has become more of a curation than a creation exercise.
7. Technology can absolutely help. A human capital management (HCM) solution can assist you in upskilling and reskilling at scale, predict on-the-job success using skills assessments, drive personalization and social connection, and document skill acquisition.
8.  If used “skillfully,” HCM technology can also provide learners with a more immersive, impactful experience that resonates on an individual level, facilitate mentorship, deliver rewards for training completion and/or skill mastery, and leverage analytics to determine what activities have the largest impact on your people and business.

So, before moving forward, make sure you understand the people systems you have at your disposal, as well as additional offerings that integrate with your technology infrastructure and will enhance the learning experience.

Remember too that any new learning strategy should be accompanied by a robust internal communications plan. It’s important to ensure that everyone, including those who are being reskilled and those who aren’t, understands why you’re undertaking the initiative and how their jobs will (or won’t) be affected.

Did you miss the webinar? Please catch us on replay to learn more about how to upskill and reskill your workforce to mid-21^st century success!

 

How You Get Paid is a Pretty Critical Job Consideration

When looking for work, we tend to think about certain key factors. Will the job be something I enjoy doing for many hours per day? Will I get along with my coworkers? What’s the salary or hourly rate?

But we might forget about a simple question that can make or break our financial livelihood: How easy or difficult will it be to get paid by my new employer?

Think about what happens when you aren’t paid accurately or on time. You might have to spend a lot of time going back and forth with your employer’s accounting department. You might not be able to make your rent, or you may need to eat into your savings. In other words, “how you get paid” is far more than an administrative detail, and treating the subject as an afterthought is a mistake.

Several years ago, I worked very hard as a birthday party hostess for a new children’s play center. I earned $11 per hour, but when my employer realized I was receiving up to $100 a day in customer tips, they cut my hourly pay by 50%. I wasn’t able to buy a car as planned that year due to the unexpected loss of income, and from that moment forward, I gave a great deal of attention to pay. What is it going to be, how will I get the money, and how can I ensure I fairly receive it?

The next time you apply to a new employer, here are three things to keep in mind.

What is the pay structure – and is it legal?

This is an especially relevant question if you are thinking of working for a small business or startup. Your new employer should have a plan in place for paying employees in accordance with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Fair Labor Standards Act in the U.S. This means that it must:

• Procure an Employer Identification Number (EIN)
• Ensure new employees file a W-4 form
• Schedule pay periods that correspond to IRS tax withholding
• Have a payroll administration system
• Report payroll taxes regularly
• Have policies in place for overtime, sick and vacation time, and other paid time off (PTO)
• Understand what constitutes an employee versus an independent contractor and is classifying workers correctly

To determine if your target company is a reputable business, check out online databases such as FEIN Search, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and Guidestar. For a fee, you can gain access to an organization’s EIN and current financial standing.

Note that if you are applying to a large company with many offices or locations, it’s probably safe to say it checks the right boxes. You should, however, confirm the details with the human resources professional managing your hire.

What are employees saying?

When deciding to take any new job, it’s worthwhile to ask how people in your role today feel about their experience. If at all possible, try to meet these workers during your interview process.

The conversation can be casual, but should include questions like: “What’s a normal day like working here?” “Do you feel your manager values and appreciates you?” And on the topic at hand: “Is getting paid simple and reliable?”

A Glassdoor search is useful in uncovering potential red flags because comments are often published by former employees, and therefore likely to be both honest and informative. Alternatively, take a look at your own network to see if you’re connected to someone who works there (or are connected by a degree of separation) to gather additional intel.

For the rest of the piece, check out the Ceridian Dayforce Wallet blog.

Could the Pandemic Be a Springboard to Sustainability?

Large companies and organizations have been making good on their recent commitment to corporate citizenship by dedicating resources to help the globe overcome some of its most pressing challenges. Sustainability has been among these key areas of focus, leading to environmentally friendly corporate initiatives from Apple’s commitment to closed-loop supply chains to the development of Patagonia’s next-generation responsible business venture capital arm.

While it’s crucial for these organizations to make top-down commitments to sustainability, business units, groups and even individual teams within them can take their own steps in playing a key role in sustainability in the new normal.  

1. Commit your team to your corporate purpose.

At the corporate level, a clear statement of purpose from executive leadership has become a critical tool in supporting sustainability. The same concept can be borrowed by unit and team managers to empower their employees to find ways to take action.

The process of defining purpose makes it clear that businesses exist to serve society and not the other way around, and the link to sustainability becomes clear,” University of Pittsburgh School of Business professor CB Bhattacharya wrote in a May 2020 article for the World Economic Forum.  

In the pandemic era, Bhattacharya recommends that companies bring their purpose to life by pursuing concrete sustainability goals and focusing on a few material areas. Unit managers can follow up on that commitment in their daily work by asking themselves questions such as: What new sustainability developments will affect demand for our products and the supply of our raw materials? What type of sustainability do stakeholders expect from our part of the business?' By adding a sustainability variable to the business unit decision-making equation, middle management can help make good on big corporate promises. 

One way to do this is to evaluate your immediate team’s carbon footprint. Although you might have policies in place already, application may need some ground-level execution. You can start by examining how your electricity, gas emissions output, and water intake were measured in the past, and consider re-measuring with a new reduction target in mind.

Encourage your senior leaders to reiterate your corporate purpose, sustainability objectives and reduction targets to all constituents, but especially the employees who will be implementing them "on the ground." 

2. Empower your employees.

Getting employees buy in to sustainability measures is critical. Motivate your employees—and build enthusiasm for your efforts—by explaining why sustainable business practices benefit everyone. Tell them how they can make a difference by incorporating these new processes and tools into daily operations.

Empowering your team requires stepped up communication. It's something the leadership team at major home health product manufacturer Sunstar learned first-hand during COVID-19. 

“The pandemic developed with unprecedented speed, and the amount of information created confusion,” says Julia Linz, senior director of HR at Sunstar. “We tried to provide regular and clear communication to our employees—especially when conveying tough messages.”

Sunstar set up a dedicated online channel to share best practices on sustainable business practices, remote work, and other timely topics, to post updates on health authority regulations, and to provide a space for confidential questions. Company leaders have also learned to seek multiple perspectives on managing the crisis from local market leaders and departmental managers.

Encourage employees or teammates to brainstorm and implement new ideas that serve customers in a more environmentally friendly manner or generally make the office a greener space. A few examples employees can take ownership over include embracing electronic file sharing to reduce paper and ink cartridge use, using reusable coffee mugs and water bottles, or even bringing plants into their workspaces to recycle stale air. They may seem like minor contributions, but if enough employees across the globe deploy them together, the benefits can add up.  

Fracture, a medium-sized company in the Inc. 5000, allows customers to upload digital photos, have them printed on durable glass, and shipped in an eco-friendly, ready-to-mount package. According to CEO Abhi Lokesh, the organization’s employees are researching ways to offset the company’s carbon footprint from raw material shipments and receivables. “Fracture is also working with We Are Neutral, a partner helping us neutralize carbon emissions through offsetting and reduction initiatives like tree planting,” he says.

For the rest of the article, check out AMEX Business.

Are You Managing Data Responsibly?

New AI-driven health tracking technologies are being used by organizations to curtail the spread of the coronavirus by monitoring and recording patrons’ and employees’ temperatures and locations to determine whether they may be a high-risk of spreading the disease. With many data-related privacy and ethical questions about this approach still unresolved, businesses looking to reopen in the new normal will have to grapple with whether or not to deploy these technologies and, if they do, how they should go about it.

Technology

At a June 2020 virtual conference about the COVID-influenced economy, futurist Benjamin Pring of IT services consultancy Cognizant spoke about the inevitable rise of surveillance technology by governments and businesses. Much like the aftermath of 9/11, the new security systems implemented during COVID-19 will most likely be here to stay, he said.

One example of the technology he was talking about comes from French "3D semantic camera" company Outsight, who has developed autonomous laser technology that uses factors like bare faces (i.e. without masks), higher-than-average body temperature and proximity to other people to identify “high spread risk” individuals within large crowds. Companies, like real estate management or security firms, can use this technology to streamline safety enforcement in an effort to keep transmission rates low.

And as the Washington Post reported in April 2020, if you enter the City Farmers Market in Atlanta or one of the Wynn Resorts hotels in Las Vegas, you can expect to be discreetly informed if you register as feverish — and may even be asked to leave.

Even in public places that operate on a smaller scale, business owners and managers are deploying thermal “healthcams.” Organizations like pharmacies, banks and restaurants are using solutions like Vivotek, which checks the number of people entering and exiting a facility. The smart camera and analytics system monitors lines and points of entry with more frequent social interaction. Other businesses are using social distancing wristbands that ring when two people stand less than six feet apart. Fitted with Bluetooth, the band tracks the wearer’s physical connection points in case the establishment later needs to track an infection.

Privacy

The biggest concern with this type of surveillance involves informed consent — the responsibility of the organization to make the appropriate efforts to communicate to those being tracked what data is being collected and how it is being processed. Some customers may be uncomfortable with automated systems routinely follow individuals through public places and record their data, and the bigger the crowd, the less likely it is that every customer will understand how they’re being monitored, and the implications of the surveillance.

For the rest of the article, head over to the AMEX Business site.