aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Overzealous about customer service

Harrah’s wants to tag and track waitresses:

In what it refers to as a “pilot program,” the casino is using the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, which send out signals that are tracked through readers installed at various locations. Harrah’s has placed the readers on tables and bars in the beverage and gaming areas to determine how long it takes cocktail waitresses to serve customers, Harrah’s Entertainment Chief Information Officer Tim Stanley said. “It just looks at the cycle time between service,” he explained.

“We are taking some of that technology and attaching it to the beverage servers on the casino floor,” Stanley added. “We at Harrah’s are zealous about customer service. We know if customers have to wait too long for a drink or a coffee, they get upset.” The program, he said, was designed to cut down on wait times for the casino’s “best customers.” [...]

Stanley told the Business Press that the purpose of the RFID tags was not to designed to try to catch employees slacking on the job. Instead, he said, the measure could actually benefit overworked servers and bartenders by demonstrating the need for more staff at busy times.

Employee-performance monitoring, however, was a chief goal of the pilot program, according to an article posted last year on technology Web site, silicon.com. In an interview with the site, Stanley was paraphrased as saying, “one employee was caught ‘loafing’ and punished accordingly.” The Silicon.com interview went on to quote Stanley as saying, “Now that person we caught probably won’t be happy about it, but their co-workers should be.”

Eric has no problem with the monitoring; me, I’m sure this is the way of the future. 

What I wonder, though, is how can we use the data to measure overworked exploitation and set the bar for productivity at some reasonable level rather than at the exceptional top performer’s level?

We have a five-day 40-hour workweek and overtime; these are socially agreed upon worker expectations measured in time. With this new level of granular measurement we should socially agree upon worker expectations, and be free to use such measurements to enforce worker protections.

How about a law that says if RFID data is collected, it must be made public with individually identifying data expunged?