Data collected from fitness trackers worn by employees could be very useful for businesses. The sharing of this data with employers is already a well-established practice in the United States, and companies in Europe are showing an interest in the introduction of such devices among their workforces. Our argument is that employers processing their employees’ fitness trackers data is unlikely to be lawful under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Wearable fitness trackers, such as Fitbit and AppleWatch devices, collate intimate data about the wearer’s location, sleep and heart rate. As a result, we consider that they not only represent a novel threat to the privacy and autonomy of the wearer, but that the data gathered constitutes ‘health data’ regulated by Article 9. Processing health data, including, in our view, fitness tracking data, is prohibited unless one of the specified conditions in the GDPR applies. After examining a number of legitimate bases which employers can rely on, we conclude that the data processing practices considered do not comply with the principle of lawfulness that is central to the GDPR regime. We suggest alternative schema by which wearable fitness trackers could be integrated into an organization to support healthy habits amongst employees, but in a manner that respects the data privacy of the individual wearer.
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The purpose of this paper is to lay the groundwork for a large-scale prescriptive research project on organizing intergenerational communities of practice as a way to help organizations deal with some of the problems an ageing worker population brings with it. After a definition of the problem, a review of four seminal works on communities of practice was done to see if organizing intergenerational communities of practice might in fact be a viable solution to the problems of an ageing organizational population. Results are encouraging and lead to the conclusion that management might start to consider organizing these communities as a way to shed new light on older workers.
MULTIFILE
The workforce in the EU is ageing, and this requires investment in older workers so that the organisations in which they work remain competitive and viable. One such investment takes the form of organising and facilitating intergenerational learning: learning between and among generations that can lead to lifelong learning, innovation and organisational development. However, successfully implementing intergenerational learning is complex and depends on various factors at different levels within the organisation. This multidisciplinary literature review encompasses work from the fields of cognitive psychology, occupational health, educational science, human resource development and organisational science and results in a framework that organisations can use to understand how they can create the conditions needed to ensure that the potential of their ageing workforce is tapped effectively and efficiently. Although not a comprehensive review, this chapter serves as a basis for further empirical research and gives practitioners an insight into solving a growing problem.
