The Paradox of Transparency
Antonio José Millán Villanueva received in the 2021 edition the extraordinary award for his professional career within the Escolático Zaldívar Awards of Fraternida-Muprespa and is the author of this interesting article that we published today on our portal Previene.
THE PARADOX OF TRANSPARENCY
The rapid incorporation into the world of work of technologies that allow remote working, such as digital platforms, intelligent digital systems, advanced robotics or Artificial Intelligence, has been generating studies on the impact that they may have on health and safety for those people who work subject to these new formats.
In addition to the tension connectivity-isolation of this type of work, there is another series of psychological and social factors, capable of leading to techno-stress or technophobia in its broadest meaning, given the accelerated and unstoppable evolution of all this new technological formulation, whose purpose is to maximize effectiveness and efficiencies.
For this reason, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, during the next two years (2023-2025) will carry out its “Safe and healthy work in the era” campaign. digital”, trying to detect those failures for occupational health in these jobs, in order to promote solutions and good practices to safeguard the physical and mental well-being of those who operate in them.
It is not, as some seasoned critic has said, to recall the old “Luddism” of the 19th century by promoting the rejection of machines or automation, but rather the use of “democratic” and not “authoritarian” technologies, to metaphorically use the distinction between both types established by the philosopher of technoscience Lewis Mumford.
A variable incorporated in the direction and management of these new work models is monitoring and transparency, through electronic devices (Wereables) e Internet and things (IoT), that interconnected in a network, they are capable of accounting for effective work times, the biological state of the worker, his/her production, etc., causing “big brother” stages whose response on the part of the observed is in many cases simulated, showing good emotional appearance despite suffering stress, in order to safeguard his/her position or career in the company. company.
The industrial psychologist Elton Mayo, noted a century ago in his well-known “Hawthorne Effect”, how People change some aspects of our behavior when we know that we are being studied; Mayo experienced it at the Western Electric Company in Chicago.
___Now history repeats itself. Under the expression Paradox of Transparency, coined by Harvard University professor Ethan Bernstein, he has demonstrated in his research carried out at the Chinese Company “PrecisionMobile”, that the greater the dose of privacy and autonomy at work, the better the results of employees subjected to these types of observation.
___Digital transformation is inevitable today, but its humanization and pace too, because speed is good if the direction is correct.
