Become a Superhero to Customers, and Watch Your Brand Soar | Fox News

Become a Superhero to Customers, and Watch Your Brand Soar | Fox News

Become a Superhero to Customers, and Watch Your Brand Soar

By John Brubaker

Customer satisfaction is a four-letter word these days. It’s also the new bare minimum. All “satisfaction” means is that your client only has one wandering eye and one foot out the door. What your prospects and clients are looking for is a superhero -- specifically for you to be their superhero.

How do I know this? Our society is fascinated with superheroes. There are 29 superhero movies slated to hit the big screen over the next four years. “Be a superhero” was even the theme of a national recruiting conference I recently spoke at.

Why this fascination with superheroes? I asked Dan Tudor, president of Tudor Collegiate Strategies, why he selected this as the theme of his conference. He explains that “in every business, even college recruitment, people are looking for someone to rescue them.”

Related: How to Provide Multiple 'Wins' Throughout the Customer Lifecycle

I couldn’t agree more. Just like our society roots for superheroes in comic books and movies, in business we like to root for people who solve problems, right wrongs and defeat evil.

Tudor says that “we’re at a point in business today where if you aren’t exceptional, you’re not going to win.”

This stands to reason, given the fact that people are so over-marketed to and have become jaded. Your best marketing is to be exceptional and even a little odd. When you’re odd, you’re not trying to appeal to everyone. Remember, superheroes can’t and don’t save everyone.

The importance of being a superhero extends well beyond the big screen and conference stages, it shows up on entertainment stages too.

In an interview with Charlie Pennachio, tour manager of Big & Rich, he explained that “to create an exceptional experience for our audience, we’ve assembled what we call our superhero team by adding artists whose strengths complement one another. For example, we’re now touring with a DJ and a rapping cowboy ( DJ Sinister and Troy Coleman) who bring a different vibe and new energy to the tour.”

He went on to state that they’ve gone so far as having Spiderman make appearances on stage to add that odd element to the performance and create crossover pop culture appeal. In the process, the tour members differentiate themselves even further from their peers.

You don’t have to actually don a costume to be a superhero. It could be as simple as what Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Hotel does. During a recent speaking engagement there, I needed to be rescued several times.

Shortly before my flight home, I forgot I had two cases of leftover books that needed to be shipped. Normally, I’d call guest services, but the Gaylord doesn’t have guest services and there’s no guest services button on the hotel room phone. Instead, they have Consider It Done Agents (the hotel's version of superheroes) and a “Consider It Done” button on phones (complete with a smiley face).

Consider It Done isn’t just some pithy slogan, it’s actually woven into the fabric of the culture. When I got off the phone with Summer, who arranged to have the boxes immediately taken from my room to FedEx, I began connecting the dots.

Related: 3 Ways Successful Entrepreneurs Build Outstanding Customer Experiences

Those boxes I mentioned got shipped to the hotel a few days earlier and were nowhere to be found upon my arrival. Gaylord staff didn’t tell me, “call FedEx yourself and ask them to track it.” Instead, the front desk manager said “we will find your boxes and bring them to you.”

Sure enough, within 20 minutes my cell phone rang and he informed me the boxes were waiting for me in my room along with a hand-written thank you card from Summer, the same agent who rescued me at the end of my stay.

With a “Consider It Done” culture the Gaylord superheroes put guests’ minds at ease by delivering an exceptional experience. I was impressed to the point that I wanted to manufacture some sort of outlandish crisis just to see what they could do for an encore. But I think we already know the answer.

Here's how you can build your superhero reputation:

Determine the evil your customers need to be rescued from. For example, bankruptcy.

Figure out how your super power aligns with this. One of my colleagues, Kim Fowler, is a realtor specializing in short sales. The evil her customers need to be rescued from is often foreclosure. Her super power is that she’s a certified distressed property expert.

Give your superhero self a name. Kim's superhero name is THE Real Estate Lady (it’s her version of Wonder Woman).

Give your superhero a motto. The Gaylord Opryland’s is “consider it done” and Mighty Mouse’s is “Here I come to save the day.”

Like these examples from various industries, define yourself as a certain type of superhero according to what you’re exceptional at. It will be what sets you apart and gives people a compelling reason to root for you

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/07/29/become-superhero-to-customers-and-watch-your-brand-soar/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fnational+%28Internal+-+US+Latest+-+Text%29

DeepMind: 'Artificial intelligence is a tool that humans can control and direct' | Technology | The Guardian

DeepMind: 'Artificial intelligence is a tool that humans can control and direct' | Technology | The Guardian

Fears that artificial intelligence will wipe out human beings are completely overblown, according to the co-founder of Britain’s DeepMind, who has insisted that the technology will help tackle some of the world’s biggest problems including accessing clean water, financial inequality and stock market risks.

Mustafa Suleyman, who with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg set up the London-based machine learning company that was bought by Google in January 2014 for £400m, mounted a spirited defence of the company’s successes. He told a conference on machine learning that “artificial intelligence, AI, has arrived. This isn’t just some brief summer for this technology, and it’s not about to go away again. These are production breakthroughs.”

High-profile figures including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have all warned that the rise of AI poses a threat to humanity – a threat that has been echoed in recent Hollywood films such as Ex Machina, The Terminator and Transcendence. Yet Suleyman insisted that AI is, and will remain, a tool that humans can control and direct, rather than a threat.

The best use for AI would be to help decisions about how to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems such as lack of access to clean water, inequality of access to food and finance, and stock market risks, he suggested.

DeepMind’s systems use neural networks and “deep learning” methods that deploy low-level transistor networks to produce high-level effects so that they can, for instance, distinguish a cat’s face from a human one – a trivial task for a human, but hard for a machine. That has been developed into “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) that can learn to solve tasks without prior programming, and have already been used to replace 60 hand-crafted systems across Google. The AGI system’s deployment into speech recognition, now used in Android phones and Google Translate, had led to the biggest overall improvement in speech recognition in 20 years, Suleyman said, with a 30% reduction in transcription error rates. Yet training the program for the task took less than five days.

Speaking to a conference on machine intelligence in London on Friday, Suleyman said that he was dismayed by the negative attitudes being shown towards AI. “It’s sad how quickly we’ve adopted to the reality and don’t acknowledge the magic and the good that these systems can bring. The narrative has gone straight from ‘isn’t it terrible that AI has been such a flop’ to ‘isn’t it terrible that AI has been such a success’.”

He said that the technology was going to be “a hugely powerful tool that we control and direct within its limits – like any tool that we have ever built … Artificial generalised intelligence is a form of intellectual horsepower – a cheap and abundant resource to solve our toughest global problems.”

Suleyman observed: “We have global information overload from overwhelming systems complexity – they’re so complex and interlinked it’s possible that the US financial crash in 2008-9 caused the Egyptian revolution [which was sparked when bread prices rose in line with wheat prices].

“But everything we have built is a product of intelligent human activity. AGI is a tool to massively amplify our ability to control the world.”

DeepMind, based by Kings Cross station in London, has developed a “generalised artificial intelligence” which was able to figure out how to succeed at nearly 50 Atari computer games without any foreknowledge of how to play them. Given inputs of just the score and the pixels on the screen, and control of the games buttons – again without any knowledge of their relevance – it was able to play as well as a human after a few hundred games. In Breakout, it played competently after 300 games – then figured out after 200 more games that the best strategy was to knock out the side bricks and let the ball bounce behind the wall: “that surprised us,” said Suleyman.

The company’s systems are now used on the Google+ photo categorisation systems, and apparently on Google’s new Photos service, to categorise and label pictures by their contents. The company is also seeking to expand that categorisation so that when there are multiple recognisable objects in a picture it can describe them all in a single coherent sentence.

But Suleyman said the idea that a machine-based artificial intelligence could take over decision and pose a threat to humans was “preposterous”.

“Any talk of a superintelligent machine vacuuming up all the knowledge in the world and then going about making its own decisions are absurd. There are engineers in this room who know how difficult it is to get any input into these systems,” Suleyman said to applause from the audience of machine intelligence specialists.

“If we fear that we won’t control them, then we should slow down their use and implementation, just like with nuclear weapons and genetic engineering” [which saw a moratorium in the 1970s].

Suleyman said he wants to make public the names of the people who sit on the company’s ethics board, which was set up at the insistence of himself and Hassabis when Google bought it. “We will [publicise the names], but that isn’t the be-all and end-all. It’s one component of the whole apparatus,” he said.

Asked what gave Google the right to choose the ethics board members without any public oversight, Suleyman replied: “That’s just what I said to Larry [Page, Google’s chief executive]. We will make more public.”

He said it had been a bold move for the 100-strong company to suggest to the much bigger buyer that there should be an ethics board at all. “Being able to put something like this on the table is a first step to being more open and helping to steward this,” he said. The company is seeking to recruit more people to its ethics board, as well as to its policy and legal teams.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/09/deepmind-artificial-intelligence-tool-humans-control

Insights Into the Productivity and Profitability of Project Management | AffinityLive

Insights Into the Productivity and Profitability of Project Management | AffinityLive



Professional Services Sector

593 KB

Time is Money PDF

To both the people who work in the professional service sector and
the broader economy, insights into the performance, technology,
productivity and profitability of the professional service sector are
extremely valuable.


To help understand this AffinityLive surveyed client-facing
professionals who manage projects on a daily basis, asking questions
about the length of projects, common challenges and use of technology.
The survey revealed that projects are overwhelmingly mismanaged due to
an inability to accurately track employee time and a failure to use
tools to plan properly, track and execute these projects. While these
problems most often plagued shorter-term projects, if these issues are
not addressed, the professional service industry is likely to miss out
on its full potential.


Below are the most striking finding from AffinityLive’s report, Blind Sweat & Tears: A Study into Client Project Management Practices Across the Professional Services Sector:

• The vast majority (more than 80 percent) of projects run for
  less than 6 months, 60 percent of projects run less than 3 months and
  the most common projects running for an average of 2 months.
• For these most common projects, only between a quarter and a third
  of respondents used project planning, tracking or collaboration software
  and in the second most common category of projects up to one month, 3
  in 4 respondents used no project management technology at all.
• Two thirds of project managers are “running blind” when it comes to
  tracking budgets & they’re even worse off when it comes to managing
  schedules with more than 3 in 4 professionals either using manual
  techniques or none at all.
• Communication
  was cited as the most critical element to a successfully managed
  project, but 90% of respondents nominated email as the most important
  method of communication - with 'collaboration' technology ranked near
  the bottom of most important methods of communication.

A Modest Proposal on How to Celebrate My Adopted Nation's Birthday

A Modest Proposal on How to Celebrate My Adopted Nation's Birthday

A Modest Proposal on How to Celebrate My Adopted Nation's Birthday

Vladimir Golstein

The author is a professor of Slavic studies at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA. He was born in Moscow and emigrated to the United States in 1979.

I would like to express my best wishes to all my American friends on this Independence Day. Let us all keep the spirit of independence alive, and resist – in the words of William Blake – “mind-forged manacles.” So here are a few ideas on how to celebrate this important holiday in the spirit of that great visionary poet.

1. Journalist and Russophobe extraordinaire, Anne Applebaum, along with her Polish husband, Radek Sikorsky, should embark on a giant apple bake. I understand that Poland is stuck with plenty of apples, that it has nowhere to sell, due to the mindless sanctions (baked into the heads of Applebaum and her fellow Russophobes) that are imposed on the natural European trade, the essential life line of modern economic life. So why not use all of these apples in a giant apple pie, with the recipe taken from Applebaum’s cookbook, which, when baked, can be presented to their bosses in Washington. After all, this is as American as Applebaum.

2. Germany and France should remember that they are sovereign nations after all, and therefore, they should stop using mobile phones. By blocking them, they would not only prevent US spying and save American taxpayers the need to pay for the storage of endless amounts of useless information, but – more importantly - -they would stop listening to the orders coming from the misguided rulers of the universe living across the ocean. And to help them to concentrate on their own economic and political affairs, maybe we should present them with our Constitution, Bill of Rights and other documents which used to mean something and used to inspire millions of people in their quest for independence.

3. Let’s send our neighbors in Mexico our presidential candidate, Donald Trump. If Saakashvili (a former Georgian President) is expected to introduce some order in Ukraine and free it from various pro-Russian undesirables, I am sure that Mr. Trump will be equally successful in this attempt to turn Mexico into a prosperous state, while freeing it of all criminals (by the way, he can ship them to Ukraine, just put a Nazi tattoo on them and they will be welcomed). It goes without saying, that the new prosperity would surely keep Mexicans happy and content in their own country, destroying the reasons that drive them to enter the USA. Once Mr. Trump solves the problem of Mexican emigration, he can return to the States and win his presidency here.

4. And here is a celebration wish for our northern neighbors, Canadians. Why do you want to build a memorial in honor of the victims of Communism? How many communists are there – in North America (sick mind of Joe McCarthy excluding)? Maybe it will be a much better idea to turn this monument into the Memorial to the Victims of Witch-hunts. In this way, you can celebrate some communists without stretching credibility, along with numerous women of Salem, and thousands more victims of mindless paranoia if not cynicism of various political leaders, whose helpless victims should be remembered on this Independence Day for their striving for dignity and independence. Furthermore if Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper is so keen on this project, he can always be memorialized in the sculpture as the Grand Inquisitor, presiding over the witch-hunting (if Joe McCarthy can be placed on the other side of the memorial, Americans surely would not object).

5. And here are some Holiday ideas for the Russians. Since you guys, don’t make anything, as our President has recently reminded the world, and since your land is mired into tyranny and corruption beyond repair, we can offer you our wonderful space rockets and take you to the moon. There you can finally be free and independent, away from your tyrannical rulers. And if your government will tell you that our rockets explode within 2 minutes of a takeoff, don’t believe it. You know that your government always lies.

6. On these important holiday it is worth remembering that the Greeks – the cradle of western civilization and political system, are about to embark on an entirely new project for independence. Bureaucrats in Brussels along with German bankers should be taught a lesson that the Persian Empire learned long ago. There is nothing stronger than a bunch of citizens fighting for the defense and independence of their country. The ancient Persian Empire learned its lesson, but modern European Emperors armed with their calculators and interest payment charts, still don’t seem to get it.

7. The world clearly waits for another declaration of independence. It is high time for Israelis and Palestinians to figure out how to achieve true independence from each other, and even more importantly, from their outside handlers, so they could pursue the interests of their own people, – which is the same as people everywhere: raise children, live in peace and prosperity, and even in cooperation with others.

8. In terms of the handlers, similar independence should be promoted for US foreign policy, which should pursue the interests of the country, rather than the interests of various neocons and liberal interventionists, who for the last 25 years have reshaped US foreign policy beyond recognition, in their bizarre attempt to remodel the world in accordance to their own, highly myopic vision. The imagined security of their various pet projects –be it Israel, or Baltic States, or Eastern European countries should be left to local populations, or computer games, but it should not govern US foreign policy. So it is high time for State Department to declare its independence from this bunch and if this group really want to govern the affairs of Israel or Ukraine, or other troubled countries – they – in the manner of prefects or procurators of the time of Rome, can follow the example of Pontius Pilate and move to Jerusalem, or if ancient history doesn’t inspire them, why not follow American-trained Mikhail Saakashvili who moves with ease from the distant republic of Georgia to the equally distant province of Odessa. So while probably not much would change in the way Ukraine, Poland or Czech republic take care of their affairs when Victoria Nuland, Brzezinski, or Allbright are installed in these countries, at least Washington would be able to pursue its own policies. After all, that was the original intent behind the Declaration of Independence.

http://russia-insider.com/en/modest-proposal-how-celebrate-my-adopted-nations-birthday/ri8503

The Myth of Putin’s 89% - Institute of Modern Russia

The Myth of Putin’s 89% - Institute of Modern Russia

The Myth of Putin’s 89%

Donald N. Jensen

A recent public opinion poll said that President Vladimir Putin had attained a record-high approval rating of 89 percent, despite Russia’s massive economic slump and tense relations with the West. But according to Donald Jensen, resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, this rating masks a more complex reality when it comes to Russians’ political attitudes and Putin may be more vulnerable than it seems.

President Vladimir Putin enjoys the approval of a staggering 89 percent of the Russian public, according to a poll published by the widely respected Levada Center on June 24. This rating is a record for Putin, whose popularity has soared this year despite the war in Ukraine at Russia’s border, economic troubles due to the decline in oil prices and Western sanctions, and little progress on economic reform. By contrast, according to the poll, only 66 percent of the public supports Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Sixty-four percent of respondents said Putin was the politician they trusted most, and the second most-trusted man in the country, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, trailed far behind Putin at 28 percent. The results also found that 64 percent of respondents approved of the direction the country is moving under Putin, up 4 percent from May.

Such impressive popular support for Putin is a key source of legitimacy for a system with weak institutions, a passive civil society, and poor fidelity to the rule of law. A high rating not only justifies the regime’s authoritarianism but also gives Putin a personal mandate to rule, which is a decisive edge in the cutthroat arena of elite politics, where it protects him from a palace coup. In order to maintain power, therefore, it is vitally important for Putin and his entourage to keep the president’s approval rating high. The Kremlin does this by taking actions that address society’s concerns (so long as they do not threaten Putin’s grip on power), mobilizing the populace on behalf of the leader’s agenda, and using its control of the media to shape public views of Putin. “Faith in the rating supersedes all. Political institutions, ideologies, in fact, the state itself,” political scientist Aleksandr Kynev said in a recent article. Putin and his image makers no doubt remember the systemic crisis of the late 1990s that accompanied the rapid drop in Boris Yeltsin’s standing.

Putin may also be helped by the fact that some Russians, according to one recent study, think about political power differently than people in the West: Russians see the tsar as distant, almost sacral, hopefully benevolent, and above the law, not bound by it. They appeal to him to make things right in a system over which they have no control. Thus, when it is said that Putin’s ratings are “high,” it does not necessarily mean that the masses adore or even like the president, but that he is playing his role effectively.

Since he came to power, Putin’s popular support has largely been driven by public perceptions of the state of the economy. During his first two terms, Russians gave him credit for their steadily increasing standard of living, with Putin’s approval rating reaching a peak of 88 percent in 2008 (until now, when it reached a new peak of 89 percent). By 2011, however, Russians were more critical of the system. Their prosperity allowed them to be increasingly concerned about their long-term economic and social welfare—in the form of things like better healthcare and education—and the development of a more pluralistic, democratic set of political institutions. Some saw the Medvedev presidency as auguring systemic reform. Their hopes for change were dashed when Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 and began to roll back civil liberties. By the end of 2013, according to one Levada poll, many Russians said they believed their country had entered a period of stagnation. Only 40 percent said they thought Russia was headed in the right direction.

This mood changed in early 2014, when national pride associated with the Sochi Olympics and the annexation of Crimea propelled Putin’s approval rating to historically high levels. The euphoria did not last long, however, as Russia was hit by an economic crisis resulting from the slump in oil prices, Western sanctions, and the economy’s longstanding inefficiencies. But rather than declining again, as many experts expected, the president’s popularity has remained high. Most Russians, spurred by the regime’s campaign of patriotic mobilization against the West and in support of separatists in Ukraine, now back Putin because they believe he is protecting them from external threats and has made Russia into a great power again.

Putin’s political future—and, indeed, the political stability of the system as a whole—thus will be determined to a significant degree by whether his popular standing begins to drift significantly downward in the coming months, either as the patriotic fervor resulting from the invasion of Ukraine fades or economic problems mount.

Despite the constant emphasis on Putin’s high rating, the evidence suggests that Putin’s support may be smaller, less intense, and more volatile than it appears, however.

First, the intensity of Putin’s support varies by constituency. Since Russia has many competing “publics” with many different opinions, “opinion” in Russia tends to be uninformed and unstable on all but a few general questions, just as it is in other countries. It also tends to be sensitive to the way survey questions are worded. Many poll respondents undoubtedly say they support Putin due to fear of the consequences of publicly criticizing him, or because of the perceived futility of going against a popular majority that the regime constantly proclaims is overwhelming. With the political space scrubbed clean of serious challengers, it is easier simply to express support for the president.

Second, Putin’s backing is apparently narrower than it seems. Political scientist Aleksandr Kynev points out that while Putin’s ratings are often presented as 80+ percent of “all Russians,” his support can be interpreted as being significantly smaller depending on the poll question. In a March poll that asked Russians who they would vote for in a new presidential vote, only 54 percent named Putin (a sizeable portion of those surveyed said they were undecided). Moreover, despite general support across the board for the annexation of Crimea, Putin has not fully won over all subsections of society.

There is one such group in particular that is important out of proportion to its numbers and that is more likely than others to push for democratic change: educated Russians working in the private sector who are 40-50 years of age and espouse European values (even while agreeing with the annexation of Crimea). The number of potentially active supporters in this group is comparable to what it was in 2011, according to political analyst Aleksandr Shmelyov. These people are concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other large cities, where they could have a disproportionate influence on the future of the regime.

Finally, the Kremlin’s ability to shape Putin’s image through the control of information is less effective than in the past. Although the broadcast media praises the president incessantly and pays little attention to any figure who might be a potential political threat, the costs of maintaining Putin’s popularity in the face of Russia’s economic problems and invasion of Ukraine have increased.

Putin’s political future—and, indeed, the political stability of the system as a whole—thus will be determined to a significant degree by whether his popular standing begins to drift significantly downward in the coming months, either as the patriotic fervor resulting from the invasion of Ukraine fades or economic problems mount. “It is not possible to live in euphoria or under threat all the time,” said Sergei Ivanov, head of Putin’s presidential administration, in a Financial Times interview earlier this month. On the one hand, the current popular mobilization over Ukraine has lasted far longer than previous spikes in public opinion when the government harnessed patriotic sentiment to consolidate support—in 1999 over the NATO operation in Serbia, in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq, or in 2008 when Russia fought a war with Georgia. If Putin conducts an even more aggressive foreign policy, he could sustain his popularity for an indefinite period. But if a settlement to the Ukraine war is reached or the conflict becomes frozen, Putin’s rating will likely decrease as the importance of state-run propaganda diminishes and popular attention shifts back to domestic problems of the sort that caused street protests three years ago.

Any marked decline in Putin’s approval rating creates a threat to his power. As analyst Kirill Rogov has pointed out, when the president’s political prospects decline, the opposition becomes more visible and its level of loyalty starts decreasing, which the public perceives as a drop in the efficiency of the leader and the regime that he built. A decline in the leader’s popular support thus radically pushes up the cost of ensuring the loyalties of the elite.

Whatever the reality of his support at the moment, Putin appears so strong that both friends and enemies have said they cannot envision the country without him. Such myopia, however, does not seem to afflict the Kremlin itself. Talk in recent days of moving up the presidential vote (along with the State Duma elections) suggests that Putin may want to take advantage of his current high rating to gain reelection before the economy gets worse and his popularity slips. Armed with a renewed mandate, Putin would be constitutionally required to select a new government, which could undertake strategies that would prolong his rule. He thus might be able to reshuffle the faces of those in power—except, of course, for his own.

© 2015 Institute of Modern Russia, Inc.

The rise of workplace spying

The rise of workplace spying

A growing number of companies are using technology to monitor their employees' emails, phone calls, and movements.

Here's everything you need to know:

How are employees being tracked?

In almost every way. If you work on an office computer, your bosses can not only legally monitor your company email and internet browser history, they can also log keystrokes to check your productivity and even see what you type on private services like Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter. If you have a work cellphone, your employer can pinpoint your precise location through GPS. A survey from the American Management Association found that at least 66 percent of U.S. companies monitor their employees' internet use, 45 percent log keystrokes, and 43 percent track employee emails. And office workers aren't the only ones being spied on. In Amazon's warehouses, workers carry tablets that record their speed and efficiency as they retrieve merchandise for shoppers; in hospitals, nurses wear badges that track how often they wash their hands. "Privacy in today's workplace," says Ellen Bayer of the American Management Association, "is largely illusory."

When did companies start snooping?

Bosses have always kept a close eye on employees. Henry Ford famously paced the factory floor with a stopwatch, timing his workers' motions in a bid for greater efficiency. He also hired private investigators to spy on employees' home lives to make sure personal problems didn't interfere with their work performance. But modern technology has greatly expanded the possibilities for employee analysis. A point-of-sale computer system connected to a McDonald's cash register, for instance, can capture how well a server sells customers on the latest meal deal; at a supermarket, such a device can record how quickly a cashier scans each grocery item. With this information, management can measure how hard each employee works — and how necessary each is to the business.

Don't invest in wine The Week Staff

Does this boost efficiency?

Yes, according to the data. A 2013 study of five chain restaurants found that eateries that used point-of-sale surveillance systems saw a 22 percent drop in theft on average, and a 7 percent increase in revenue. In 2009, UPS fitted its delivery trucks with about 200 sensors that track everything from driving speeds to stop times. This allowed the firm to find out which drivers were sneaking breaks, and to determine how many deliveries could be squeezed into one day. Within four years, the company was handling 1.4 million additional packages a day with 1,000 fewer drivers. Employees, of course, resent the relentless monitoring. One UPS driver told Harper's that the company used performance metrics like "a mental whip," adding, "People get intimidated and they work faster."

Who does the actual monitoring?

It's all done automatically: Software programs scan employees' email accounts and computer files and alert supervisors to anything inappropriate. What constitutes inappropriate, of course, is up to each company. Alerts will be triggered at some firms if an employee visits a pornographic website; at Goldman Sachs, emails containing certain swear words are flagged and sent to compliance officers. The American Management Association says a quarter of large and midsize firms have fired employees for misusing office email or the internet. But companies aren't only concerned about detecting offensive behavior by employees.

What else are they looking for?

Some companies search for evidence that employees might be thinking about quitting. They check for obvious signs such as Google searches for headhunters and job-listings sites, but also track subtler signifiers of discontent, such as employees who refer to the company as "they" in emails rather than the more inclusive "we." Bosses might then try to entice these employees to stay, or take steps to ensure that if they do leave, they take no confidential data or client lists with them. But it's a tricky balance — if employees discover their boss has been spying on Google searches they thought were private, office morale can plummet. "Right at the heart of all of this is trust," says Ken Oehler of Aon Hewitt, a human-capital consulting firm. "What sort of message does it send that they need to monitor [workers'] desktops?"

Can employees stop this tracking?

Generally, no. Most employee contracts give management free rein to do what it wants with data gathered from office-issued equipment, but some surveilled workers are fighting back. A former sales executive at wire-transfer firm Intermex filed an unfair dismissal lawsuit against the firm earlier this year, alleging that she was fired after she uninstalled an app on her work cellphone that tracked her whereabouts 24/7. Myrna Arias claims her boss even bragged that he could use the app to tell how fast she was driving when she was off duty. But with few legal protections against prying employers, employment experts say workers should avoid doing anything on their company computer or phone that they wouldn't want their superiors to see. "Even if your boss says you're not being monitored," says Nancy Flynn, founder of the Ohio-based consultancy ePolicy Institute, you should "just assume you're being monitored."

Listening in at the water cooler

If you find the idea of your boss reading your emails creepy, how about having your location, tone of voice, and conversation length monitored throughout the working day? Boston-based analytics firm Sociometric Solutions has supplied some 20 companies with employee ID badges fitted with microphone, location sensor, and accelerometer. Sociometric Solutions doesn't record conversations or provide employers with individuals' data. Instead, it crunches data and looks at how employee interactions affect performance. At Bank of America call centers, for example, the firm found that workers in tightly knit groups who took breaks together were more productive and less likely to quit. The bank introduced a shared 15-minute coffee break to improve social interaction and saw productivity increase more than 10 percent while turnover plummeted 70 percent. "It's not just a case of saving tens of millions of dollars," says Sociometric Solutions CEO Ben Waber. "I can also point to thousands of people who say they like their job better."