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The article directly contradicts its title. They aren't "heat mapping employees" they came up with a scoring system to estimate the most likely stores to union
by BubRoss 6y ago
The article directly contradicts its title. They aren't "heat mapping employees" they came up with a scoring system to estimate the most likely stores to unionize.
"The scores are based on more than two dozen metrics, including racial diversity, employee loyalty, "tipline" calls, and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration."
Whatever they are doing to avoid employees unionizing, it isn't "heat mapping" them. It isn't even heat mapping stores. That would imply some sort of density+value combination. This is a ranking based on weighting various data points into a single score.
- happytoexplain 6y agoPersonally, I consider this heat-mapping, since I think of heat-mapping as any value over area, regardless of how the value is derived. What specifically makes you feel this case doesn't qualify? Also, do you think there is something nefarious about the term "heat-mapping"?
- black_puppydog 6y agoI tend to agree with GP about the terminology. I opened the article with the expectation of reading about GPS or WiFi/Bluetooth beacons or some such. I find it outrageous but unsurprising (and thus even more outrageous) that this is happening, but the "map" here doesn't seem warranted.
- IMTDb 6y agoThey are - at best - heat mapping stores, not employees. And heat map have a sense of density over a region, it is by definition continuous values where the area has a major impact on the final value. Here they just rate each store. If this is considering "heat mapping". Then basically anything that gives score to stuff that can be placed on a map is also "heat mapping". This includes : - Your company "heat mapping" their clients according to the revenue they generate - The US department of education "heat mapping" the students based on the SAT scores - My mom "heat mapping" her next holiday destination based on price When we think about heat-mapping a person, we immediately imagine tracking where that person spends time. Until I read the article, I was imagining whole food setting up cameras in their store to see if employees spend time congregating. And that would be a horrible thing to do. But giving points to stores based on - among other signals - how many sales they generate. Well... that is the least worrying thing I read all day. So the whole point of the article is to instill fear into the reader by - willingly - using the wrong terminology to give a bad image to a known company - even going as far as adding "Amazon-owned", just for the sake of it - until the astute reader notice of deceiving the article really is. And if you did not take the time to fully read their "article" (I have other words that are far less nice to describe that kind of writing) well your judgment of a company just got biased without any ground.
- filoleg 6y agoWhile I agree that "heatmapping" can be interpreted the way the article used it, I don't think that this is what comes to people's minds when they hear that phrase, so I would call it misleading at best. But saying that they are "heatmapping employees" is blatantly wrong. They aren't heatmapping individual employees, they are scoring/heatmapping stores.
- jonathankoren 6y agoyeah, but what are they measuring? The building? The profit-loss statements? No. They're measuring the attitudes of the employees in the store. If you're measuring the employees in a store, it is perfectly reasonable to say you're measuring the employees. Sure you could change policies and affect P(union), but you'd still be measuring the effect on employee attitudes.
- filoleg 6y ago>but what are they measuring? >They're measuring the attitudes of the employees in the store. You answered your own question here. This is the exact same thing all corporate surveys and evaluations are measuring. When a company does performance reviews, annual surveys to get employees feedback on things, re-evaluates what kind of candidates they need to attract and how to adjust their recruiting efforts appropriately (e.g., "we hire too many people from target schools, we need to start reaching out more to the talent pool outside of those"), etc. It is all the same thing, and every single company over a certain size does it. You don't think McDonalds or Home Depot or Kroger do a similar kind of "heatmapping" to evaluate the state of their branches and the employee feedback? Even at tech companies, it is a thing. My employer does an annual company-wide (anonymized) survey, asking all employees for their opinions on their work engagement, fairness of compensation, etc. And from what I heard from my friends working at other tech companies, they all have something similar.
- jonathankoren 6y agoI’m really confused now. Is it “blatantly wrong” to say they’re measuring employees or not? Because it sounds like you’re trying to split a hair, but there’s no hair to split.
- IMTDb 6y agoYeah, but it's business insider we are talking about. A title like "Retailer give points to each of their store" (which is exactly what the article explains) does not sound nearly as scary as anything containing the words "heat mapping employees" (which the article explicitly contradicts). You can't really expect "chief correspondent" specializing in "breaking news, analysis, and in-depth investigations on large public and private companies" to resist the temptation to drive clicks by writing the most sensationally wrong title they could find.
- KirinDave 6y agoI'm pretty sure that producing a single score tracking the liklihood of a unionization movement at every store is "heat mapping" up to isomorphism. Your density values are provided by physical location.