Using IoT devices for sensor-based monitoring of employees' mental workload: Investigating managers’ expectations and concerns

Investigation of Information Privacy in Employment: Fundamental Knowledge and Practical Solutions for the Human-Centered Design of Measures to Preserve the Right to Informational Self-Determination in Employment

“…The current state of research in this regard is insufficient in several respects. Firstly, previous work on privacy issues in employment has mostly focused on aspects of information system use [2,3,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48], workplace monitoring and surveillance [4,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57], and on employee recruitment [58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70]. Their emphasis was on investigating (adverse) behavioral effects and developing remedial strategies to make sure (1) that employees accept new information systems, (2) that employees' work performance is not affected by monitoring activities, and (3) that organizations do not lose applicants due to privacy invasive recruiting strategies.…”

“…These include, e.g., employees' trust in management, work motivation, job satisfaction, and psychological strain and stress. With a particular focus on the latter, a number of recent studies have surveyed managers in the U.S. and Europe about the barriers they perceive to the adoption of Internet of Things in the workplace for monitoring employees' mental load and health [50,52,55]. They found that while managers believed the technology could help counteract stress, they generally considered its invasiveness to be an intrusion into their employees' privacy, and that the resulting privacy concerns were the main barrier to Internet of Things adoption in practice [52,55].…”

“…With a particular focus on the latter, a number of recent studies have surveyed managers in the U.S. and Europe about the barriers they perceive to the adoption of Internet of Things in the workplace for monitoring employees' mental load and health [50,52,55]. They found that while managers believed the technology could help counteract stress, they generally considered its invasiveness to be an intrusion into their employees' privacy, and that the resulting privacy concerns were the main barrier to Internet of Things adoption in practice [52,55]. They also expressed concerns about the legal basis provided by the GDPR, prompting Gauttier [50] to call for expanded controls on employee use of wearables that allow fine-grained co-determination over purposes, information types, and recipients.…”

“…Regarding the samples used, we found that more than half of the studies reported using U.S. samples, while one third of the studies included samples from Europe, especially Germany [2,3,31,33,38,39,41,55,96,259]. However, samples from other parts of the world are rarely represented.…”