research-article

Sensible organizations: technology and methodology for automatically measuring organizational behavior

Authors:

Daniel Olguín Olguín,

Benjamin N. Waber,

Alex PentlandAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics, Volume 39, Issue 1

Pages 43 - 55

https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCB.2008.2006638

Published: 01 February 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We present the design, implementation, and deployment of a wearable computing platform for measuring and analyzing human behavior in organizational settings. We propose the use of wearable electronic badges capable of automatically measuring the amount of face-to-face interaction, conversational time, physical proximity to other people, and physical activity levels in order to capture individual and collective patterns of behavior. Our goal is to be able to understand how patterns of behavior shape individuals and organizations. By using on-body sensors in large groups of people for extended periods of time in naturalistic settings, we have been able to identify, measure, and quantify social interactions, group behavior, and organizational dynamics. We deployed this wearable computing platform in a group of 22 employees working in a real organization over a period of one month. Using these automatic measurements, we were able to predict employees' self-assessments of job satisfaction and their own perceptions of group interaction quality by combining data collected with our platform and e-mail communication data. In particular, the total amount of communication was predictive of both of these assessments, and betweenness in the social network exhibited a high negative correlation with group interaction satisfaction. We also found that physical proximity and email exchange had a negative correlation of r = -0.55 (p < 0.01), which has far-reaching implications for past and future research on social networks.

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Published In

cover image IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics Volume 39, Issue 1

Special issue on human computing

February 2009

302 pages

ISSN:1083-4419

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Copyright © 2009.

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 01 February 2009

Revised: 26 November 2007

Received: 15 April 2007

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Zhang QZhu HWang PChen EXiong H(2023)Hierarchical Wi-Fi Trajectory Embedding for Indoor User Mobility Pattern AnalysisProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35962377:2(1-21)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596237
Raman CVargas-Quiros JTan SIslam AGedik EHung HKoyejo SMohamed SAgarwal ABelgrave DCho KOh A(2022)ConfLabProceedings of the 36th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3600270.3601992(23701-23715)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2022
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