HR sends out automated email warning employee their 'engagement score' has dropped 7 points, fails to realize he was working on a deep-work project

Do you want to be monitored by a robot in your own workplace?

Nobody wants to feel like they're just a number, even at work. We all want to feel like we're being rewarded for our individual contributions, and like we're being evaluated holistically. Sure, business is about numbers. You can quantify some forms of output, and that's important. Metrics and stats are a valuable way to put evidence to performance. But the best managers know that it's more than this. It's not just the numbers you churn out, it's the impact you make on your team. It's the relationships you build, the skills that you learn, and the critical thinking you do. These are harder to put numbers to. That is, unless you're a company that desperately wants to. That's what happened in this situation, where a company implemented some interesting tools that ended up backfiring on their employees. Nobody wants to get a scary email from HR in the middle of the workday. It doesn't instill a sense of comfort in you, and indeed might spark a sense of fear. You hope you didn't do anything wrong, and you hope that your job isn't at stake. In this day and age, the thought of your job being threatened over something small is almost too much to bear. It's a tough world out there, and you don't want to be fed to the wolves just because an HR tool detected something in your performance.