A great thing about living in this advanced digital age is having no need to ever know where you are or where you’re going, because any one of several navigation apps on your phone can always tell you. But while GPS has been helping us navigate the streets for years, we’ve remained largely on our own when it comes to finding our way through buildings — until now.
Navigation apps may soon become commonplace in the workplace, helping employees navigate large, confusing and unfamiliar office buildings, the Wall Street Journal reported. Some companies have already introduced this technology, providing employees with apps to help doctors reach sick patients in unfamiliar parts of large hospitals or workers find the right conference room in a massive corporate office.
At a time when the rise in remote work means many employees are often less familiar with their physical office space, the move to introduce navigation apps in the workplace makes sense, but helping employees find their way around isn’t the only thing this technology can be used for. As workplace navigation technology continues to spread, such apps could be used increasingly to track employees’ location and monitor productivity — which has raised privacy concerns among some critics.
“I would think that the main impetus behind these apps is really for tracking of productivity,” Ifeoma Ajunwa, assistant professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University, told the Wall Street Journal.
“Having the ability to find where people are when they’re not tethered to their desks is huge,” said Charles Whiteley III, a technology supervisor at Exxon’s environmental and property solutions division, where a wayfinding app is expected to launch by the end of March.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone loves the idea of their employer being able to track their location at all times of the day. Workers involved in a year-long pilot of a workplace wayfinding app in Los Angeles county raised privacy concerns back in 2018, which Steven Steinberg, the county’s geographic information officer, shared.
“I probably don’t want my employer to know where I am every second of my day either,” he said.
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