Using A.I. and neural activity monitoring on workers? I am using it on my team. Why is it bad? [closed]

Question

I have just tested some new software and techniques on our team and I got a very defensive response here...

My workers are kind of into it, some are not.

I made sure they do not rebel, the moment I fired all the slackers in the team and told them loud and clear "slackers are not my friends".

I would record my workers as much as I can. I would even like to read their thoughts, literally read their thoughts if it would be possible...

Answer 1

Even If It's Not Trolling, It's a Recipe for Creating Disastrous Outcomes

This is (at best) tangentially on topic as a project management question, and may possibly be trolling. Even assuming good intentions, it's hard to see how the prevailing literature and extant best practices don't answer your question.

Assuming you are a project manager, and looking at this from a project management perspective, this is an epic leadership fail on a number of fronts. These include:

1. Command-and-control thinking, where you consider workers (especially knowledge workers) as assembly-line functionaries and fungible assets.
2. Fear-based management, which is fairly common under Theory X, assumes a lack of self-actualization and motivation of employees, and creates an adversarial relationship rather than a collaborative one.
3. It actually creates more work, not less, for management and senior leadership because it disempowers teams. This is a desireable outcome only for fear-based management, where the management team actively fears irrelevance or loss of control, or fears the consequences of their own hiring and management decisions.
4. From a game theory perspective, it incentivizes mediocrity and busywork rather than creativity, and prioritizes activity (often random) rather than setting the stage for successful project or business outcomes. For example, if you measure constant mouse movement, you get constant mouse movement; you don't intrinsically get useful increments of work completed, or incentivize creativity or "measure twice, cut once" thoughtfulness.

If you truly have lazy, unmotivated employees, the problem is still you and your organizational culture. You hired these folks; you define what the team and the organizational culture value; you decide who to keep and who to replace. By failing to hire self-motivated, self-actualizating team members who are invested in their professional careers (not "jobs") and the desired outcome of the project, you've created a toxic atmosphere and a situation where all outcomes must be driven top-down.

If you don't have lazy, unmotivated employees (yet), rest assured that treating them as lazy, unmotivated people and continuing to disempower them will ensure that they quickly become such. Your top talent will flee, and the Gideon Band and Dunning-Kreuger effects will ensure that the median skills, abilities, and productivity of the team trend ever downward.

The science is not behind what you're doing, and neither is the body of accepted best practices. If you have sufficient authority to do it anyway, just remember this fundamental leadership axiom: If you break it, you get to keep both halves.