What if your company ID badge was a tracking device? You’d wear it from the moment you got to work in the morning til you clocked out at night. Your badge would constantly collect data that could potentially benefit you and the whole company.

Great news: It exists.

A company called Sociometric Solutions has developed this technology. They insert microphones, Bluetooth, and other proximity sensors into an employee’s company ID badge. So far, they’ve had a 90 percent participation rate in every rollout they’ve done.  

“What we’re trying to do is really quantify what people have always felt to be unquantifiable,” says Ben Waber, President and CEO of Sociometric Solutions. “Things like, how are people interacting with each other? How do you talk to customers? How engaged are you in a conversation? And how is information flowing in an organization?”

How does Sociometric Solutions get workers to agree to participate in the research process?

“[We] don’t just come into a company and say, ‘Here everybody, wear this sensor.’ It’s actually about a four week rollout process,” says Waber. “We give people consent forms, which show them the actual database tables of what we collect.”

Naturally, participants have had privacy concerns. But Waber tells them not to worry: “We won’t share your individual data with your company. We don’t even keep your name in the database where we are calculating all the features.”