'When you are dictating the minutia of what someone needs to do for the job, you do not trust your employee': academics explain how Amazon’s latest innovation reveals the risks of over-optimizing workplace technology
Amazon’s development of “Amelia,” a proposed pair of smart glasses designed to optimize delivery drivers’ routes, marks a new frontier in workplace technology, aiming to shave seconds off each delivery. But while such innovations promise efficiency, they also raise critical concerns about employee autonomy, safety, and morale.
Experts, including Jason Walker, associate professor and program director of industrial and organizational psychology at Adler University, warn that top-down approaches to leadership that push workers to conform to increasingly rigid systems can undermine the very productivity such tools seek to enhance.
“It's like treating an employee as a cog in a tech-optimized machine. And I think when we do that and we take away decision-making, it leads to burnout and resistance,” Walker says.
"You should be able to go left if you want to go left, because you know the route is better. And when you are dictating to the minutia of what someone needs to do for the job, you do not trust your employee. And it feels like that is what this is about.”
Workplace technology: saving seconds at the cost of employee morale
Amazon’s glasses aim to optimize the “last 100 yards” of delivery, but critics question whether the focus on seconds is misplaced. The use of delivery glasses for step-by-step navigation might seem like a game-changer, but Walker views the move with skepticism.
“I think there's a bit of a slippery slope when it comes to this chasing hyper-efficiency thing,” Walker says.
“It's going to shave off seconds, and seconds will save us all this money, versus actually looking at the issue ... it's just that downloading of corporate responsibility onto the employee, to do something that seems almost too much to ask.”
Quentin Durand-Moreau, assistant professor of occupational medicine at the University of Alberta, explores how such technology can overstep boundaries, risking worker satisfaction and long-term productivity.
Using the example of “voice picking” technology that involves headphones on warehouse workers that instruct them what to do throughout the day, Durand-Moreau explains how a common issue with widely-implemented technologies is the lack of consultation with employees.
“This kind of tool is really built with a vision of productivity, where the input of the worker is not discussed,” says Durand-Moreau.
“It's kind of a top-down thing, where we're looking at saving time, but where the overall picture of what works is not taken into account. This kind of system is usually set up on just certain parameters of work, usually reducing ‘dead time’ – time that doesn't provide value-added to the business, where there's no profit generation, wait times … which are usually extra time for the workers to think of the overall process, little breaks that help them be able to sustain and carry on.”
Reducing autonomy has physical and mental consequences
Durand-Moreau goes on to describe the physical and mental impacts that reducing employee decision-making through technology can have, from musculoskeletal effects to job strain.
The reason for these effects is increased job intensity, he explains, resulting from fewer opportunities for employees to decompress via breaks and autonomy.
“When you have those little breaks, when we don't push the workers to destroy every single dead time, the times that are not providing any value added to the business – if the aim is to get rid of all of this, it means that the work is going to be more intense … it means that all of the muscles are going to work way more and produce way more painful substances, and their likelihood of generating musculoskeletal disorders.”
Even if a job is not highly physical, Durand-Moreau stresses, an increase in intensity will result in higher cases of musculoskeletal disorders, such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
Psychologically, taking away decision-making power also causes “job strain”, which is the result of employees working in conditions in which they have little control.
“When you are asking the workers to comply with orders that are not discussed, and provided by a system on which you have no influence over, it really reduces your decision latitude. And if you reduce your decision latitude, it increases your risk of job stress,” Durand-Moreau says.
“According to the Karasek [job demands-control] model, job strain is defined as a situation associating low decision attitudes and high psychological demands, and it's associated with increased cardiovascular diseases, and a number of mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.”
Effects of technology innovations on social interactions at work
Furthermore, Durand-Moreau warns that tools like Amazon’s delivery glasses might also disrupt essential social interactions at work.
“If I take the example of the voice-picking system, where the system talks to the worker through a headset and gives instructions, we’ve seen that it precludes human interaction,” he explains.
“When a worker sees another worker and just says ‘hi’, the system says ‘error’ or ‘system error.’” Such disruptions, Durand-Moreau adds, can lead to isolation, eroding the camaraderie that often sustains workers in demanding roles.
Ultimately, the integration of tools like smart glasses must be approached thoughtfully, balancing technological innovation with the human element. Organizations that fail to address these considerations risk not only harming their employees but undermining the long-term success of their innovations.
“When you introduce a new technology, it's not just a way to do work, but the tool itself has an impact on the way you conceptualize the task,” he says.
Conscious implementation of technology tools
For technology to truly enhance the workplace, Durand-Moreau stresses that it must empower employees rather than control them, and the success of workplace technology depends on its adaptability and the ability to involve workers in shaping its use.
While technology holds immense potential to improve the workplace, its implementation must prioritize employee involvement, flexibility, and respect for the complexity of human work, rather than being a way to “standardize to the extreme.”
“We have room to improve it, to take it, to appropriate it, to not let it take control,” Durand-Moreau says. “There should be a lot of discussions prior to implementing the technology with the workers, discussing all of the consequences. There should be trials.”
Legal and systemic implications of technology
Beyond practical concerns, introducing such technology can invite legal scrutiny, Walker says.
"There would be a real need to examine the legal aspect of this level of surveillance," he says. Additionally, questions arise about whether failure to comply with a technology such as Amazon’s proposed smart glasses could result in disciplinary action: "What is your policy and process going to look like if they go left and didn’t go right? Is that a discipline offense?"
The pursuit of hyper-efficiency often overlooks the human element, which is critical for sustained productivity. "Smart leaders know that the sustained productivity comes from respecting their workers and trusting their workers and not pushing people to that breaking point," Walker explained.
"This isn’t life or death. This isn’t the golden hour of getting someone to a trauma center. This is getting a package to someone’s door … when that individual is out of the truck, saying hello to people, petting a dog—do we really need to prescribe that piece, or can we trust them to get the job done?”
