Understanding Organizational Behavior with Wearable Sensing Technology

We describe how recent advances in wearable sensing technology allow for unprecedented accuracy in studies of human behavior, particularly organizational behavior. We use one such platform, the Sociometric badge, to understand organizational behavior in two studies. In the first, we describe the collection of data over a period of one month in a German bank's marketing division. We found that physical proximity had a high negative correlation with e-mail activity, and by combining behavioral data and electronic communication data we were able to very accurately predict self-reports of personal and group interaction satisfaction and performance. Next we describe an experiment at a data server configuration firm, and we discovered behavioral variables that had extremely high correlations with objective productivity measures. In both studies the fine-grained behavioral variables measured by the Sociometric badge played a critical role in predicting outcomes