Imagine a workplace that adapts to your emotions
It’s Tuesday morning, and you walk into your organisation’s new workplace, already feeling the weight of a particularly stressful day. Your smart glasses pick up on your elevated anxiety levels. Suddenly, the environment around you begins to adjust. The lighting softens to a calming glow, your desk smoothly transitions to a standing position, and soothing ocean sounds begin to play gently from nearby speakers.
This isn’t science fiction – it’s a glimpse into the not-so-distant future of emotion-responsive workplaces.
Advanced emotional sensing technology is already here—for example, Emteq Labs‘ latest smart eyewear, called Sense. With an impressive accuracy of over 93%, Sense can interpret your emotional state by analysing subtle facial muscle movements. It also monitors eating habits by combining cheek muscle activity with advanced food recognition algorithms. These glasses have the potential to be a powerful tracking tool, offering users real-time insights into their emotions and behaviours – Source.
What if employees chose to share this data with their employer, enabling workplaces to be optimised for everyone’s emotional and physical well-being? Could this pave the way to a workplace utopia, or are we edging dangerously close to a dystopian “1984” scenario?
The Sense glasses are set to launch for commercial partners in December 2024. However, this isn’t the first time such technology has entered the market. Take, for example, the Feel wristband. The Feel wristband has been tracking emotional health through wearable technology for several years. In recent years, it has specifically marketed itself to employers as a tool to “transform the emotional health of employees.” Through its connected smartphone app, it offers real-time support and evidence-based interventions, ranging from mood journaling to breathing exercises – Source.
Do you think emotional technologies like the Sense Glasses and Feel Wristband could successfully optimise workplace experiences?
An emotionally intelligent workplace could transform data not just into insights, but also actively adjust the environment based on users’ emotional states by doing the following:
- Adjusting lighting and temperature based on collective stress levels.
- Tuning acoustics to improve focus or alleviate stress in the increasingly popular open-plan offices, by altering background sounds to boost concentration or reduce anxiety.
- Automatically reconfigure spaces to encourage collaboration when team energy is high or provide privacy when individuals need to decompress.
- Schedule breaks and suggest mindfulness sessions when stress levels peak.
The potential benefits are compelling: workplaces could evolve from static environments into dynamic spaces that actively enhance employee well-being and productivity. But could this be too good to be true?
In a world where privacy concerns are increasingly in the spotlight, this vision of an emotion-responsive workplace raises important questions. While Australian privacy laws protect individual emotional data from employer scrutiny, even anonymised collective data holds significant power. The challenge lies in balancing the potential benefits with legitimate privacy concerns.
Would employees feel comfortable knowing their emotional states contribute to workplace adjustments, even anonymously? In a culture that values both innovation and personal space, could this create subtle pressure to maintain certain emotional states at work? Surely workers should have a right to feel how they want to feel, right? These questions deserve careful consideration as this technology evolves.
As employers push the boundaries of workplace innovation, the question is not just whether we can create the most optimal emotion-responsive environments, but whether we should—and if so, how to do so thoughtfully. The potential to create more supportive, engaging workplaces is particularly relevant as Australian businesses compete for talent in an increasingly global market.
The workplace of tomorrow may indeed respond to our emotional states in various ways, but the challenge will be ensuring it does so in a way that prioritises human well-being, rather than simply enhancing organisational efficiency.
The most promising path forward may be to first deploy these technologies in research-controlled environments, gathering insights that can benefit all organisations without requiring individual workplaces to adopt potentially privacy-invasive technology. This approach could help us understand the true potential of emotion-responsive workplaces while safeguarding what matters most: the privacy and autonomy of employees.
