The End of Workplace Hooky?!?

Raise your hand if you've ever played workplace hooky.

Wow -- that's a lot of hands up out there (mine included).

Well, the news for all of us is that the game's about to get a lot harder to play.

According to numerous reports published in the last few days (Caleb Garling at Wired Enterprise here, John Ribiero at PC Advisor here, Thomas Clayburn at InformationWeek here, and Quentin Hardy at the New York Times' Bits Blog here, among many others), Google Maps can now be used to find out exactly where you are.

For a fee of $15 per employee per month, administrators can use Google's Maps Coordinate (with software downloaded onto employee smartphones running Android 2.0 or higher) to determine where any employee is at any given time.

The positive side of this -- which is of course what Google emphasizes -- is that, in the event of an emergency, a telephone company (for example) could immediately locate its nearest technician and send them on. (Click here for a blogpost by Google senior product manager Daniel Chu explaining Maps Coordinate's features in detail.)

This isn't the first mobile employee-tracking service, but it appears to be the simplest and smartest, offering real-time updates. It can even track employees within a building (so stopping by your favorite boutique that's in the same building as your client's office just became trickier....).

We can all probably think of times where Maps Coordinate's capabilities would be extremely valuable (like the "find me a technician close by now" example).

Oh, but then there are the negatives.

Google claims that Maps Coordinate can be turned off by an employee (when he or she is leaving the office for home, for example). But what if you work for someone who doesn't believe in work-home boundaries?

What if you want to stop in the park to write up your notes from a client meeting? That's not really hooky -- you're still doing company work -- but all the administrator watching you knows is that you've been sitting in the park for the last 15 minutes. Highly suspicious behavior, wouldn't you say?

Doesn't this feel a little too "1984"-ish? Can you say, "Creepy"? I thought so.

The Times' Hardy quotes the chief executive of a game developing company: "How perfectly horrible! ...You can track who is stopping by whose cubicle? That's HR gone made. You should worry about what people are producing, not where they are producing it."

Easy for him to say, with assets that go home every night. If your company relies on the creative and/or intellectual skills of its employees to produce its product or service, you probably want to err on the side of giving them some leeway. But if you rely more on technical skills -- for example, the driving ability of your delivery team -- your profits may be much more, shall we say, geographically dependent. If I were RAPS (Rose-Anne's Pizza Supreme), with ten people out racing all over Fairfield County CT delivering my fabulous pies, knowing where they were at all times would matter to me. A lot.

But would the negative vibes I'd get back from my drivers be worth the extra dollars RAPS would earn? I'm not so sure.

One of the first lessons I learned as an employee is that when companies start nickel-and-diming their employees, employees nickel-and-dime right back. And the employees are usually better at the game, so it turns into dime-and-quartering. After all, employees can be just as "absent" at their desks as they are on the road....