A Smartwatch App That Lets Your Boss Track You Constantly

Kris Duggan is building a social smartwatch app that lets your boss track your quantified self.

That may sound like a Silicon Valley send-up. But it’s the real thing. Today, Duggan and his 18-month-old startup, BetterWorks, announced that this wearable app would arrive in the summer, bringing their corporate-goal-setting service to the much-anticipated Apple Watch. And the app’s pedigree—for what it’s worth—is littered with notable names.

BetterWorks is backed by John Doerr—a Google board member, one of the Valley’s most respected investors, and, it so happens, a witness in this week’s high-profile gender bias case brought against his firm: Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers. Despite the trial—now underway in San Francisco—Doerr has been out pitching BetterWorks to the press. He’s adamant the service can app-ify the sort of high-energy performance tracking he brought to Google in the late ’90s.

The app is very real indeed. And it plays into not one but several ideas the pundits say will remake the business world in the years to come: social apps, “the quantified self,” and, yes, wearable hardware. As Duggan puts it, the new app rides the BYOW trend: “bring your own wearable.” And that may well be. The question—for BetterWorks and for the rest of the tech world—is just how much people really want these trends. Businesses may want them. But do workers? Will they really bring their own?

Why Didn’t I Think of That?

BetterWorks is an app that lets businesses track the performance of their employees. A company agrees on specific goals for each employee, and from the app, managers and workers can monitor the progress of these goals. The basic idea is that all this happens constantly and in the open (anyone can track the progress of anyone else).

“The real product metaphor for me is: FitBit for Work,” Duggan says, referring to the wearable device that tracks your physical activity. “How do we make things open, transparent, measurable, and engaging?”

Doerr compares the service to the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methods he learned at Intel under Valley legend Andy Grove and brought to Google in 1999. “Google was about 30 employees,” he remembers, “and we were around a ping-pong table on University Avenue above an ice cream shop in Palo Alto.” When Duggan first pitched him the BetterWorks idea, Doerr says, he was both “exhilarated and depressed.” As he tells WIRED: “I knew the need was there. I saw how this transformed Google. But I also thought: ‘Why didn’t you think of this, John?'”

That said, Google tracks performance from quarter-to-quarter—with monthly “check-ins”—while BetterWorks tracks it all time. It’s meant to be a social app, where people digitally “nudge” each other to pick up the pace and congratulate colleagues when the job is done. Today, all this happens on desktop, laptops, and smartphones (about 50 companies are now using the existing BetterWorks service). And now Duggan is expanding into watches, so you can nudge people from your wrist.

BetterWorks Upwind

Peter Wells, the CEO of a green-energy startup called Upwind, says his company has been using BetterWorks for the past six months—at least among some of its employees. He cut his teeth at GE, under a very different form of performance tracking, but he sees real value in the way BetterWorks does OKR. The company can monitor performance on “an almost daily basis.”

“I love the ability to nudge people, to check in with people, to see the activity, to encourage, to cheer, to really stay engaged with what’s happening, and to see where you’re falling behind,” he says. But he acknowledges that some employees may not like the methods as much as managers.

Sce Pike came to a similar conclusion overseeing a different kind of quantified self program at Citizen, a Portland, Oregon, mobile tech company. It explored not company goals, but the exercise, eating, and sleep habits of workers to see if the company could correlate lifestyle habits with success on the job. She acknowledged that while such intel could be valuable to employers, these kinds of programs don’t work without buy-in from workers. You need a company culture that believes in “quantification,” she says, before acknowledging that Citizen has shut down its program.

Happiness Over Performance

If there’s one person qualified to speak for the individuals of the world on the subject of the quantified self, it’s probably Chris Dancy. He has spent the last six years publicly tracking nearly everything he does on the job–and more—and he warns that employees may not have the time to add this to their online social existence. He also warns that such tracking should be used merely to look for ways to change habits or behavior—not necessarily to rate the performance of every employee.

“If it’s not looking at what I could be doing to make me happier—in ways that don’t necessarily line up with a company’s goals—it’s not going to succeed,” he says. “It may get a lot of funding. And a lot of people may sign to use it. But that doesn’t meant it’s good for people.”

Duggan says that employees are free to participate in BetterWorks as much or as little as they see fit, calling it “opt in.” But he also acknowledges whether people opt in or not, their companies set the goals on the service. And that means there’s built-in pressure to participate. In short, it’s a complicated situation. But that’s often the case with BYOW—“bring your own whatever.”