Dive Brief:

• Employers are hanging out incognito on Slack and other communication platforms to gauge employee satisfaction, reports Quartz.  
• AIR, a Japanese software company, is promoting software that scans workers’ conversations on Slack to assess their morale, says Quartz. The product, called Vibe, searches for keywords and emojis before categorizing workers’ moods into either disapproval, irritation, happiness, stress or disappointment.
• The process, called sentiment analysis, is almost 10 years old, but was mostly used by marketers to assess consumers’ behavior, says Quartz. Tools like Vibe are aimed at workplace communication as employers try to uncover employee engagement levels; in turn, this information could help employers drive down their costs, retain highly valued staff and shrink their workforce.

Dive Insight:

The popularity of apps like Slack is easy to understand, given their ability to enhance productivity and foster communication between teams of employees, as long as ground rules for users are determined in advance.

But managers who “go underground” to find out what they want to know about employees risk eroding their trust, which all workplaces need if they value engagement and loyalty.

Employees, especially work teams like those found on Slack, can only expect so much privacy in the workplace. If they discover that an employer is “spying” on them, they might refrain from speaking candidly in future chats. This would hinder employers’ efforts to get the information they want.