When a system is introduced that schedules employees, makes workload visible and bills services, co-determination is not a formality at the end of the project. It is a work package of its own, and anyone who plans it too late loses months.
We went through this process from start to finish in a corporate group. What surprised us: the questions we had prepared for most intensively barely came up. The questions that decided the matter were in none of our slide decks.
The question that determined everything
“Can this system show how much an individual person works?”
That is the core of it. Not data protection in the abstract, not AI, not the cloud, but the question of performance and behaviour monitoring. A system that displays workload per psychologist can in principle also be used to appraise performance. That possibility cannot be argued away, and trying makes everything worse.
What did work: acknowledge the possibility and talk about the limits. Which analyses exist at all? Who is allowed to see them? Can person-level analysis be restricted technically? Are team-level rather than person-level views possible? What is logged, and who can read the logs?
Those answers turn into a works agreement. Reassurances turn into mistrust.
The question about how voluntary it is
“Will our people now have to disclose when they are available?”
A system in which psychologists maintain their own times sounds like relief, and it is. From the employee representatives’ point of view it is at the same time a structured record of working-time preferences that previously existed only in emails.
Here the distinction between availability for sessions and working time helps. Someone who records that they are not available for assessments on Tuesdays says nothing about whether or on what they work on Tuesdays. That separation has to hold in the system, not only in the explanation.
The question that sounds technical and is not
“What happens to the data once the procedure is over?”
This question comes from the data protection officer and the works council at the same time, for different reasons. And it is the question that shows whether a supplier knows their own product.
The bad answer: “data can be deleted.” Of course it can. The question is whether it happens.
The useful answer describes periods: when is candidate data anonymised, when deleted? How long are documents visible to psychologists? What is kept for traceability, and is that personal or aggregated? Does it happen automatically or does someone have to remember?
The questions we had expected
On AI. We had prepared a detailed section. The question came, and was answered in two minutes, because our answer is simple: the assistant plans, warns and drafts. It does not judge people and makes no selection decisions. Where that is the case, there is little to negotiate.
Had the answer been more complicated, “the AI supports pre-selection”, it would have become the longest session of the project.
On hosting. EU data centre, German contracting party, data processing agreement. Important, but rarely controversial, because these are hard facts.
On the cloud as such. Barely came up. In most organisations that discussion is over.
What made the difference
Three things, in hindsight:
Start early. The works council was involved before the decision was taken, not afterwards. That costs time at the start and saves more at the end.
Show the system, do not describe it. A live view of the analyses answers the monitoring question better than any slide. You see what exists, and what does not.
Play nothing down. If a system makes workload visible, it makes workload visible. Anyone who relativises that loses trust for every other statement as well.
What you should bring
If you are facing this process, it helps to prepare with something other than marketing material:
- a list of every analysis the system offers, stating whether it is person-related
- the roles and permissions concept, concrete enough to show who can see what
- the deletion periods per type of data
- a clear statement of where automation ends and people decide
- contacts who can answer technical questions instead of taking them away
Most of that should come from your supplier. If they cannot provide it, that is information about the supplier.
The documents we prepared for this process, an overview of the analyses, the roles concept, the deletion periods and the principles for using AI, are available to our customers. Talk to us.
