Amazon Should Monitor Its New CEO Like It Monitors Drivers and Fulfillment Center Workers
New research suggests that senior executive performance would benefit from the same sort of monitoring increasingly applied to blue-collar workers
Amazon has been experimenting with putting Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled video cameras inside of its delivery vehicles to watch the drivers and provide them with feedback on their driving. In fulfillment centers, employees’ activities are closely monitored. They’re only allowed a certain number of bathroom breaks (so workers sometimes resort to peeing into a bottle). Further, Amazon has patented a wrist device to more closely monitor fulfillment center workers, and the system uses AI to provide those workers with helpful haptic feedback — to make them more productive. This trend is beginning to extend to white collar jobs, where senior management increasingly monitors usage of employee computer systems (e.g., to verify when they log on, and what they do during the day).
Traditionally, senior executives (particularly, the C-suite of CEO, CFO, etc.) are not monitored this way. They typically receive compensation primarily based on the company’s performance (relative to targets set by the company’s board), rather than on any…
