This is the battle for your brain at work

We don’t all have the luxury or ability to focus for long stretches at a time, which is something that Oliver Oullier, the president of the bioinformatic company Emotiv, based in San Francisco, California, thinks neurotechnology can address. At the outset of a recent talk he gave at the Fortune Global Tech Forum, Oullier acknowledged that we are “not equal when it comes to focusing. Some people can focus very, very deeply for forty-five minutes. Others for two hours.”

But the solution he offered was a far cry from my desktop tomato.

Oullier was unveiling the MN8, Emotiv’s enterprise solution for attention management. The MN8 looks like standard earbuds (and can in fact be used to listen to music or participate in conference calls). But with just two electrodes, one in each ear, it allows employers to monitor employees’ emotional and cognitive functions in real time.

Emotiv teamed up with the German software company SAP SE to create Focus UX, a system that reads employees’ cognitive states in real time and shares personalized feedback on their attention and stress levels with both them and their managers. SAP claims this will create a more responsive workplace environment in which computers help employees focus on what they are best “able to handle at that moment.”

Oullier described a hypothetical data scientist who is wearing the MN8 earbuds. She’s spent several hours videoconferencing with her team and is now reviewing codes. Alpha brain wave activity has been used to index the attentive state in her brain. Higher alpha power is correlated to mind wandering or inattention, while lower alpha power has been correlated with a more attentive state. The proprietary algorithm sees that her attention is flagging, so it sends a message to her laptop: Christina, it’s time for a break. do you want to take a short walk or do a five-minute guided meditation to reset your focus?

Employers can use the data to evaluate individual users’ cognitive loads, compare them across their workforce, and make decisions about how to optimize their workforce for greater productivity throughout the day. And of course, to make promotion, retention, and firing decisions.

Other companies offer similar technology, such as Lockhead’s CogC2 (for Cognitive Command and Control), which provides companies with real-time neurophysiological workload assessments so they can “understand the performance cycles of individuals and teams” and “optimize their workforce for increased productivity and improved employee satisfaction.”

All this might remind you, as it did me, of the incredibly unpopular “attendee attention tracking” feature that Zoom rolled out at the height of the global pandemic, which informed meeting hosts when an attendee minimized their Zoom window for more than thirty seconds (maybe it’s more like that feature on steroids). Public outrage and negative media coverage quickly led Zoom to remove the feature, which was a relief to me as I multitasked through my Zoom meetings or turned away momentarily to attend to one of my children.

In case you are thinking, Well, even if my employer tries to measure my attention, they won’t know what I am paying attention to, think again. Research on workplace engagement funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture found that with EEG, it is now possible to classify the type of activity an individual is engaged in—central tasks (e.g., programming, database, web development), peripheral tasks (e.g., setting up a development environment, writing documentation), and meta tasks (e.g., social media browsing, reading news sites). As pattern classification of brain wave data becomes ever more sophisticated, employers will be able to tell not just whether you are alert or your mind is wandering but also whether you are surfing social media or developing code. 

Your employer might even nudge you back to work when your mind starts to wander. The MIT Media Lab developed a system called AttentivU, which measures a person’s engagement in real-time via an EEG headband. A scarf provides subtle haptic feedback in the form of vibrations whenever the wearer’s engagement declines. Researchers found that people who received haptic feedback logged higher EEG alertness scores than those who didn’t. While the Media Lab Group were excited about their results, they acknowledged the risk for misuse, saying they hoped that “no one will be forced to use this system, whether in work or school settings.” Given our current workplace trends, that hope seems unlikely to be realized.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. If some employees choose to use neurotechnology voluntarily to improve their productivity, others may clamor for it too. Empowering people with tools to improve their productivity while giving them control over the data they generate could allow them to reap the benefits of better time management without any sacrifice of their autonomy. Just like my pomodoro timer!

As with other neurofeedback, self-monitoring for productivity can help us establish more positive work habits as we learn when and why our attention wanders. This can be empowering in other ways too. The more productive we are, the greater our bargaining power to demand higher wages and better working conditions. 

If brain productivity technology is imposed on workers by management and used punitively instead, we should expect employee to object to its use. Some are already doing so. Unionized workers at Rio Tinto’s Hail Creek mine in Queensland, Australia, refused to wear SmartCaps because of just those concerns in 2015.

Those concerns resonate with my own research findings. My lab conducted a follow-up survey to our study on the sensitivity of brain data that I discussed in chapter 1. We asked 110 Americans what concerned them the most about others having access to their brain data. Far and away, their number one fear was the uses their employers might put it to, much more than governments, insurance providers, law enforcement, advertisers, hackers, or family and friends.

They have good reason to worry! Existing laws do little to protect employees from workplace surveillance. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies to EU residents, creates a floor that many countries now abide by. But the GDPR and applicable local privacy legislation only requires employers to have legitimate reasons for collecting employee data. Those can include public health and workplace safety, but they also extend to workplace efficiency and productivity.52 The result is that employers who decide to adopt workplace brain monitoring are generally free to do so.

Data-protection statutes across the world strongly favor freedom of contract between employers and employees and limit government oversight that would interfere with the terms and conditions to which employers and employees agree.

Take Article 329 of the Constitution of Ecuador, which forbids the use of discriminatory instruments that affect people’s privacy.53 At first glance, it appears reasonable, but it says nothing about the use of technology in the workplace for nondiscriminatory uses. In most countries, such as Mexico and South Korea, if an employee consents to the use of surveillance technology, the requirements of workplace privacy are satisfied. In practice, that means so long as brain monitoring is fully disclosed in employee handbooks and privacy notices, an agreement to work is tantamount to consent. Even Article 19 of the Chilean constitution, which secures to individuals a right to physical and mental integrity, can be abridged with consent by an employee.

And yet, I suspect that many employers will discover that brain monitoring won’t be worth the squeeze on their employees. Monitoring brains for focus may increase stress and undermine employee morale, which could make employees less rather than more productive. Employees have been known to engage in counterproductive behaviors when they dislike surveillance technology, such as deliberately manipulating surveillance systems, taking great pains not to be monitored, or even falsifying their work product to meet performance requirements. “They basically can see everything you do, and it’s all to their benefit,” said Courtenay Brown, who works in a giant refrigerated section of the Avenel, New Jersey, Amazon Fresh warehouse. “They don’t value you as a human being. It’s demeaning.” The growing belief by workers that surveillance creates inhumane working conditions is fueling unionization efforts across the country.

I witnessed these effects first hand recently. Like many others, I have come to rely heavily on the gig-economy workers who deliver groceries and other essentials to our home. It’s not uncommon for our family to place several grocery orders per week with Instacart, a company that operates a grocery delivery and pickup service in the United States and Canada, from different venues in tow. One day, I placed a same-day delivery order only to realize that I had left off a few essentials. Since I had already missed the time window to update my shopping cart, I placed a second order for the next two-hour window. Twenty minutes later, I received a panicked text message from an Instacart shopper, Shannon, saying she had been working on my first order when she was assigned the second one. The problem, she explained, was that if she delivered both my orders together in the later time window, she would be penalized for delivering the first order late. “Could you call in and change the delivery time for the first order?” she asked.

Instacart employees receive weekly productivity scores based on factors like the number of on-time and late deliveries they make, how long it takes them to pick each item in the store, and the percentage of customers they correspond with. Instacart’s laser-like focus on productivity has improved its profit margin, but its shoppers live in constant fear of being fired over situations that are often out of their control, like the quandary I had inadvertently put Shannon in. To meet the time constraints constant monitoring has introduced, some workers skip bathroom breaks, relieving themselves in bottles and plastic bags.

When our attention also becomes the currency of productivity measurements, employees may be driven to similarly extreme measures, such as attempting to combat even brief periods of mental downtime. This can substantially erode the quality of their contributions. Research across nine hundred Boston Consulting Group teams in thirty different countries found that downtime is critical to employee success, as it increases alertness, improves creativity, and leads to greater output quality.60 Creative ideas and solutions depend as much on minds wandering as staying on task. Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton both famously claimed that their task-unrelated thoughts were critical to the biggest problems they addressed in their work.

Decades of medical and psychological research show the negative impact of high job demands and low job control on workers’ health. We are approaching a mental health crisis of epic proportions as billions of people worldwide struggle with anxiety, fear, and depression. COVID-19 exacerbated the problem, and unchecked brain monitoring will make it even worse. Job strain is strongly linked to depression and anxiety, the risk of ulcers, cardiovascular death, and even suicidal thoughts. All of which may convince even the most determined employers to give up on their efforts to monitor our attention.

Many, ironically, may then fall straight into the arms of neurotech companies that offer seemingly more benign applications of neurotechnology—for example, to help employees improve their mental well-being.

Excerpted from The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.