Three inevitable impacts of workplace wearables

The modern workplace has been invaded by tech trend after tech trend in recent years. Just a little over half a decade ago, it was Bring Your Own Device. Pretty soon it will be wear your own device.

The wearable tech revolution that started with health and fitness tracking has spilled over to various other industries. Just recently, for example, Adobe pointed out that wearables can potentially disrupt the travel industry. Meanwhile, the workplace is already starting to experience what Adobe has predicted for travel.

Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets

Wearables are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and they inevitably impact organizations and how they do business every day.

Complementing work-life balance for employees

In PwC’s Consumer Intelligence Series, the professional services firm explored “connected living in a wearable world,” delving into consumer insights, use trends, and impressions regarding wearable wearables. Unsurprisingly, health and fitness remained the primary motivator respondents cited as the reason they use such devices.

This reasoning also had significant implications for how organizations delivered work-life balance to their employees.

The PwC report recounted how a tech company offered employees a subsidy covering the cost of a smartwatch. The company’s employees can track their activity with the smartwatch and convert these into points, which can then be used to redeem merchandise or donate to charity.

It’s an ideal example of workplace wearables benefiting both the employer and employee. In the above case, the company translated the smartwatch investment into reduced costs for employee health care, time off taken for sick leaves, and even improved productivity. The employees, on the other hand, had more motivation and a better means to track their health and fitness while either rewarding themselves with merchandise or helping a charity.

Influencing, tracking and increasing productivity

The same PwC report also noted majority of respondents wanted wearable tech at work, and their primary motivation was to be more efficient. Companies can undeniably benefit from wearable tech – they can be used for tracking workforce movements and logging time, for instance.

This is even more handy in conditions when staff is working from home. The current coronavirus pandemic is not only changing the way we live, but also the way we work. Don’t be surprised if in the future, companies opt to have more of their staff working from home. Wearable tech might be even more useful in this case as it provides a way to monitor the workforce remotely.

Volkswagen put together an avant-garde application of wearable tech to drastically increase workforce productivity. In 2015, after a three-month pilot phase, they rolled out 3D smart glasses as standard equipment for factory workers at one of their plants. Through their glasses, shop-floor employees received all the information they needed in their field of vision, such as part numbers and storage locations.

Indeed, depending on the wearable in question and the work involved, there are multiple ways an organization can adopt the wearable tech trend to its benefit. Best of all, wearable tech — and the providers offering them to organizations as part of their business model — is cost inhibitive.

Now that the topic has drifted to cost, it’s time for the final, inevitable impact that workplace wearables will have on organizations today.

Companies will be requiring and paying for wearables!

As early as 2015, Gartner predicted that some companies will be requiring their employees to wear health and fitness tracking devices. In a recent report, Gartner says some two million employees in will be outfitted with wearable tech as a requirement.

Of course, the research and advisory firm tempered its prediction by indicating that professionals with dangerous or physically demanding roles will comprise a majority of these two million employees. In other words, first responders, paramedics, and firefighters, among others — and that makes sense, since wearable tech can help monitor heart rates, respiration, and overall stress levels for the employees’ own safety. Gartner added that critical job roles — airline pilots, industrial workers, and political leaders, for example — would also benefit from wearable tech.

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But the PwC report on wearables indicated that although respondents want wearable tech in their workplace, most of them (67%) expect their company to pay for the tech. Now, extend this concept further and it’s plain to see the direction the trend is heading. For organizations, the advantages are obvious:

• Track employee activities and complement time logging
• Monitor stress levels and reduce healthcare costs
• Complement work-life balance through policy implementations
• Potentially increase productivity through augmenting current employee capabilities and improving efficiency

For employees, since the advantages are clear to see, wearables are well on their way to becoming standard issue, required and paid for by their organizations.

And all this started because consumers wanted to track how many steps they’ve taken. Indeed, all of this continues to be fueled mostly by the way wearables promote better lifestyles in general. The simple fact that wearables help promote healthier, better lifestyles is already enough reason for organizations to seriously consider how to incorporate wearables into their daily operations.

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