If you have a Digital Visitor Management system like DigiGreet then you are clearly interested in the safety of the people on your site. At the moment the boffins at Digigreet are pondering about the use of tracking and trying to get their heads around whether or not this is something we should be adding. This could be the scenario…

The benefits are obvious, in the event of an emergency we know exactly where you are, we don’t need to have a roll call at the muster point because we already know who’s there. More importantly, we know who’s not and we can tell the emergency services exactly how many people are trapped and exactly where they are. Who wouldn’t want to sign up for that?

I would imagine the people on your site would sign up to it, it also means that they don’t need to sign or fob in and out, so no more phone calls from anxious facilities managers asking if you are still on site because you forgot to sign out. So we are all good, right?

Oh, and HR are happy because they know really easily who was late and how often, or who left early, flexi time is so easy to administer now that we have the good old DigiGreet person tracker.

Come appraisal time Frank, your line manager, sits you down, and you can give him all the justified and acceptable explanations for your attendance. You weren’t expecting him to comment on your time on the loo though, since your IBS kicked in those morning breaks have got a little long so that was a bit embarrassing. You feel the lovely happy company culture changes a bit, you are trusted a little less but of course you know that’s  not true, its fair enough, they have given you a free consultation for the IBS now they know about it, they are still looking after me and care about my welfare.

The next month they fit sensors all over the place and get a new management information system to track my work output as well as my location, at the next appraisal Frank said how amazing I was in the mornings, achieving almost two thirds of my daily output between 8:30am and noon, his proposal to shorten my working hours to the morning only was a bit of a shock but it seems to make sense, my hourly rate will go up so everyone’s happy.

I’m not at all happy, they’ve noticed I walk to the stores the long way and want me to go the direct route, but I love the route past the flower beds, they give me that little piece of calm in my daily life which is important to me, I use the time to think and de-stress, Frank said he understands but its company policy, why are they tracking my every move, I’m not a robot. Sod this, I’m going to find another firm that’s not monitoring my location or analysing my work output to the nth degree…

Was that an exciting glimpse into the possibilities we have available to us or a scary look at how we will be controlled and monitored which we take our freedom and creativity? We have to decide how to progress…