Professional services members have reported that the University of Birmingham is running analytics on e-mail accounts of Professional Services Staff as part of a process of “functional coordination”, possibly connected to the Cubane process (now called Cubane/Nous),  where universities are benchmarked against each other for the purposes of reducing costs.

We know that more broadly in workplaces beyond the University of Birmingham and the HE sector, employers are using AI to come to a range of decisions about workers, which has included choices regarding workers redundancies. We have conflicting information from both management and our members about how ‘functional coordination’ works. Our current understanding is that based on the data collected by Cubane Consulting, decisions are made about the productivity of the staff members whose email Inbox is being monitored. In the last negotiations meeting (29 September) management have said that functional coordination is a form of workplace mapping which has been implemented by employers across the sector. BUCU noted the undoubtedly considerable expense involved in the investment of such technology and questioned what kind of medium-term and long-term savings our own employer hoped to achieve through functional coordination. 

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has recently noted challenges in this area, saying that employers “must make their employees aware of the nature, extent and reasons for monitoring”, saying that excessive monitoring “can undermine people’s privacy especially if they are working from home” and warning that it will “take action if necessary”.The ICO has specific data protection considerations for different ways or methods of monitoring workers.

The ICO requires employers to complete a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) if they are considering monitoring emails due to the high risk to workers’ data protection rights and freedoms and the likelihood that monitoring emails will capture special category data.

The TUC reports that increasing use of AI by employers weakens Health and Safety reporting and increases inefficiencies in the workplace. (See TUC articles here and here).

If you have any information to share about the process of functional coordination, Cubane/Nous or any other kind of workplace mapping, please get in touch with the Branch Secretary (Andrew Olson – acolsonolson@gmail.com) who will collate and anonymize information. In particular, we are interested in whether this has been optional or required; whether staff who have been a part of these mapping or surveillance exercises were informed of monitoring or it was done without their knowledge, and whether our employer has taken into account data protection considerations.  Please let us know about any other concerns you may have about this exercise, what it purports to do and whether it is fit for purpose.  More generally we are interested to hear about and understand any kinds of automated data collection methods being used on staff.