Cisco is opening up the proverbial pandemic-induced Pandora’s box of productivity with enhancements to its Webex People Insights feature that will allow for the collection of insight targeted at employee well-being.

Starting this summer, Cisco’s Webex will begin collecting information on video calls for individuals, teams, and organizations to promote employee well-being, nurture relationships and connections with their colleagues, and drive a more inclusive work experience, whether that’s in the office or at home, said Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s SVP and GM of security and collaboration, at this week's Cisco Live event.  

Patel added that the design goal of pulling Webex Graph data and serving it through an integrated portal is to “make sure that we can help people with their well-being."

The Personal Insights feature gives individuals a window into their work week, providing visibility into how many meetings they accept, amount of time spent listening versus talking, and multitasking during meetings.

The principle of the new features is not inspection, Patel explained. “The principle is allowing people to improve their well-being because productivity, in our mind, is a derived outcome not a primary outcome. Productivity happens when well-being is actually managed. If people are mentally healthy and rested, if people are feeling fresh, then they will have productivity.” 

Patel made a point to reiterate that Personal Insights “are insights that the system has based on your behavior for you, not your boss, not your boss's boss, not your organization, they are for you.”

Well-being and productivity extends to how various teams within an organization communicate and collaborate. To this end, Cisco introduced Team Insights to “fundamentally rethink and change the way that people get a view of how, in aggregate, they're working,” Patel said. It gives each team member a view of patterns between connections, collaboration habits, and work-life integration for the entire team, while maintaining privacy. For example, Team Insights can show the percentage of meetings that are taking place outside of their team’s preferred working hours.

Companies are making greater strides – and promises – to drive inclusion, but it's “the combination of technology and leadership that truly start to change cultures,” Cisco’s Fran Katsoudas, EVP and chief people, policy, and purpose officer, said.

Cisco developed the broader Organizational Insights to unwrap collaboration trends and patterns within a company to identify silos or teams that may benefit from additional support or an increased focus on inclusivity.

Tracking productivity has been around since the first production line rolled when managers could keep a watchful eye over output and efficiency. Now, barricaded by geographic limitations, employers have found it much harder to know if their employees are really doing their jobs.

Cisco is framing the new Webex services around employee well-being, “thinking about the user first versus the organization,” which sounds great. However, industry analysts, and journalists on the pre-brief press conference call echoed a resounding tone of concern regarding the protection of personal privacy, which begs the question: Is this new service crossing the line of big benefit and big brother?

“I don't think Cisco has crossed the big brother line,” Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, said. “When it comes to worker activity, users are worried any time it's perceived they are being watched.” Or as Patel said, “trust is accumulated in drops, but lost in buckets.”

“We have to make sure that we are very, very careful on how we honor people's privacy, and we will continue to do that across every scenario,” Patel added.

Critically, Katsoudas said the company is not going to “put tools out there that feel like big brother. Our intent is not to monitor our people, but to empower them.”

Reading the room becomes next to impossible if you can’t see the people in it. And considering the countless number of studies on the complex topic of nonverbal communication, of which most experts agree that 70% to 93% of all communication is nonverbal, seeing the audience is just as important as hearing them speak.

Hybrid work has muddied the conference room waters, so to speak. “The problem is people that are remote now can’t read the body language of the folks that are the conference room now, they can't see the facial gestures and the twitches that you might see when you hear it up close, putting the people that are remote at a disadvantage because of the geography,” Patel said. “I think one of the things that we as a community should try to do is make geography not a barrier for going out and doing work."

To aid this effort, Cisco is previewing a new capability called People Focus, which is powered by camera intelligence that uses machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to individually re-frame meeting participants who are spread across a meeting room. 

Patel used an example of four people in a conference room and two people working remote. The AI-powered feature will crop the faces of each person in attendance into their own separate box. Regardless of location, people that are remote can watch, read, and engage with everyone’s body language and gestures. 

Cisco has been investing very heavily in AI and ML over the past couple of years and “you're now starting to see all these capabilities come to life,” Patel said.