Open offices. Chances are 7 in 10 that if you work in an office in the United States, you work in an open office. Top executives and thought leaders, from Michael Bloomberg to Elon Musk, are vocal supporters of the open office design, going so far as to forgo private offices for themselves to work side-by-side with the rest of their staff. However, while management may value the collaboration and spontaneity that such offices engender, there’s plenty of research indicating that today’s workforce isn’t as thrilled with the current status quo.
A study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that nearly half of workers in open offices cite issues with sound privacy and 30 percent raise concerns about visual privacy. This perceived lack of privacy can have a negative impact on employee performance, engagement, and job satisfaction. Combine the open office with the growing trend of open and transparent leadership practices, and its no wonder that more businesses are relying more on technology to support open
In fact, with a proper introduction and education on how security robots operate, workers should welcome their addition as a technology that enhances office security while respecting individuals’ privacy, especially when compared to the use of human security officers. That’s because unlike humans, who can’t help but see and hear everything around them, security robots are programmed to detect and focus on anomalies. They’re not interested in your phone conversation or the website you’re visiting. When a robot rolls by your workspace during the workday, unless you’re doing something as out-of-the-norm as tap dancing on your desk, it doesn’t “see” or “hear” you. It processes your presence as raw data, compares it to data representing “situation normal”, and moves on. Nothing is recorded and nothing is reported. By comparison, if the robot rolls by at 3:00 a.m. and perceives your presence, it will identify the situation as not normal and its cameras and microphone – as well as its ability to help – will be engaged. The robot isn’t a spy; it’s a “problem” detector and helper.
Most employees are more primed than they realize to accept the value that an AI-driven robotic assistant can bring to the workplace. After all, a huge percentage of us already make use of an AI assistant at home, like Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod or Google Home, that is ever-ready with a microphone. Some devices, like the Echo Dot, also have camera. A 2018 Neilson study3 found that 24 percent of US households own a smart speaker, and 40 percent of those have more than one. Trusting that those devices are not spying on us at home is not much different than trusting that a security robot isn’t spying on us at work. Home devices only focus on input after a specific prompt, like “Hey Google.” Security robots focus on relevant input based on anomaly detection – situations and behaviors that could lead to a security or safety threat – and ignore the rest.
This isn’t to say that security robots are a panacea for privacy-starved employees working in an open office. But when brought into the workplace with transparency and proper employee training, they provide a novel way to balance security benefits with privacy concerns.
