No abstract

Previous studies of seasonal effects on sleep have yielded unclear results, likely due to methodological differences and limitations in data size and/or quality. We measured the sleep habits of 216 individuals across the U.S. over four seasons for slightly over a year using objective, continuous, and unobtrusive measures of sleep and local weather. In addition, we controlled for demographics and trait-like constructs previously identified to correlate with sleep behavior. We investigated seasonal and weather effects of sleep duration, bedtime, and wake time. We found several small but statistically significant effects of seasonal and weather effects on sleep patterns. We observe the strongest seasonal effects for wake time and sleep duration, especially during the spring season: wake times are earlier, and sleep duration decreases (compared to the reference season winter). Sleep duration also modestly decreases when day lengths get longer (between the winter and summer solstice). Bedtimes and wake times tend to be slightly later as outdoor temperature increases.

No abstract

Assessing performance in the workplace typically relies on subjective evaluations, such as, peer ratings, supervisor ratings and self assessments, which are manual, burdensome and potentially biased. We use objective mobile sensing data from phones, wearables and beacons to study workplace performance and offer new insights into behavioral patterns that distinguish higher and lower performers when considering roles in companies (i.e., supervisors and non-supervisors) and different types of companies (i.e., high tech and consultancy). We present initial results from an ongoing year-long study of N=554 information workers collected over a period ranging from 2-8.5 months. We train a gradient boosting classifier that can classify workers as higher or lower performers with AUROC of 0.83. Our work opens the way to new forms of passive objective assessment and feedback to workers to potentially provide week by week or quarter by quarter guidance in the workplace.

Several psychologists posit that performance is not only a function of personality but also of situational contexts, such as day-level activities. Yet in practice, since only personality assessments are used to infer job performance, they provide a limited perspective by ignoring activity. However, multi-modal sensing has the potential to characterize these daily activities. This paper illustrates how empirically measured activity data complements traditional effects of personality to explain a worker's performance. We leverage sensors in commodity devices to quantify the activity context of 603 information workers. By applying classical clustering methods on this multisensor data, we take a person-centered approach to describe workers in terms of both personality and activity. We encapsulate both these facets into an analytical framework that we call organizational personas. On interpreting these organizational personas we find empirical evidence to support that, independent of a worker's personality, their activity is associated with job performance. While the effects of personality are consistent with the literature, we find that the activity is equally effective in explaining organizational citizenship behavior and is less but significantly effective for task proficiency and deviant behaviors. Specifically, personas that exhibit a daily-activity pattern with fewer location visits, batched phone-use, shorter desk-sessions and longer sleep duration, tend to perform better on all three performance metrics. Organizational personas are a descriptive framework to identify the testable hypotheses that can disentangle the role of malleable aspects like activity in determining the performance of a worker population.