Smart Watches for … Learning? | CLO Magazine

While smartwatches are heavily used for health and fitness, there is an opportunity to integrate this technology into components of organizational performance, group collaboration, and behavioral coaching. This article provides a few examples of how smartwatches can be used in organizations: 1) Watches could indicate which people in the workplace have the knowledge we need to answer a question, including if they are close to our location or available for a digital coaching moment. 2) Mental readiness to learn: Bioindicators could measure if one is tired or feeling stress, indicating to learners that now may not be the best time to engage in certain learning activities. 3) Provide digital coaching on behavior patterns. If an employee is working on improving interactions with colleagues by not interrupting colleagues mid-sentence, the smartwatch could provide real-time or end-of-day feedback to the employee about their behaviors, including how they are improving. This example is very similar to how my Apple watch just informed me that I am behind in my progress to complete the daily exercise targets that I have set for myself. Such an alert has prompted me to alter my behavior by getting up and taking a walk. When applied to an organizational setting, such approaches will have privacy concerns that need to be considered. Still, there is an opportunity to explore these ideas, especially when considering that, as of today, just in the US alone, 21% of people have a smartwatch–with the numbers growing daily.