Social Physics: What is It?
"Offices are little whirlpools of sociality, in which hierarchies (age, power, coolness) and impulses (friendship, competition, productivity) clash and mix. But they’re also highly regulated and tightly controlled—perfect living laboratories, in short, for data scientists. In “Social Physics,” Pentland says that his team has studied all sorts of workplaces, including “creative and research teams in companies, post-op wards in hospitals, plain old back-room operations, and call centers.” Their method is to “instrument” as many aspects of office life as they can. They track e-mails, instant messages, and other forms of communication; they measure productivity; and, most importantly, they give everyone a device called a sociometric badge. The badge looks like a slightly bulky I.D. card. When you wear it, on a lanyard around your neck, it tracks your location; it also measures, every sixteen milliseconds, a variety of interpersonal variables, including “the tone of voice used; whether people face one another while talking; how much they gesture; and how much they talk, listen, and interrupt each other.” When all this data is combined, it offers something close to a total, continuous picture of office life"
" Eighty employees at a Bank of America call center were asked to wear the sociometric badges all day, every day, for six weeks. Life at the call center was almost fanatically regimented: Pentland writes that call center managers “often try to minimize the amount of talking among employees because operations are so routine and standardized.” At this call center, even the coffee breaks were scheduled individually, so as to maximize the number of workers on the phone at any given time."
"The mystery to be solved, in this environment of extreme solitude, was why different teams of operators handled their calls at different speeds. Pentland found that, of the four twenty-person teams he tracked, the ones with the fastest “average call handling time,” or A.H.T., were also the most social. In fact, the most successful teams spent more time doing exactly what their managers didn’t want them to be doing: talking. Pentland suggested the introduction of team-wide coffee breaks, designed to encourage mingling. The increase in speed was so dramatic that Bank of America did the same at all of its call centers, generating a fifteen-million-dollar increase in annual productivity (and, presumably, some newly quantifiable amount of good cheer)."
Source: Big Data Comes to Office, Joshua Rothman in NewYorker
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