Personally, 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"?
They 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.
While 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.
yeah, 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.
>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.
I’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.
>Is it “blatantly wrong” to say they’re measuring employees or not?
Yes, because they are not measuring each employee individually. At no point in the decision-making process individual employee data is used. They are obtaining and using the data as an anonymized aggregate and then draw conclusions based on it.
Which is very different from what "heatmapping employees" would imply. If it was "heatmapping stores" in the original post title (which was changed since I posted my first comment in this thread), then I would have no issue with it whatsoever.
