Why the works council is asked first

An objection that too often only surfaces at the end of a project

In many IT projects the order of events is unfortunate: a tool is selected, checked technically, agreed with the management board, budgeted — and only shortly before the rollout does the employee representation (in Germany the works council, or Betriebsrat) even learn that it is affected. By that point so much has already been invested that every objection looks like interference, however justified it may be in substance. The result is a conflict that a little more lead time could have avoided.

With a tool like JiCo this objection is not merely justified but structurally almost unavoidable if it is ignored: a system that records which person approved a particular action, and that keeps figures on decision times, quickly looks from a workforce's perspective like an instrument that actually monitors the people, not the software. That concern cannot be dismissed as unfounded — it is the reason the question has to be thought through from the beginning, rather than being answered only once it is asked loudly.

What JiCo actually records — and what for

The audit trail does indeed list which person granted a particular approval. That is not an incidental design decision that could just as well have been left out — the ability to evidence an action necessarily requires that it remains traceable who was responsible for it. Without that entry the whole record would be worthless, because in the end it would no longer be possible to attribute who really decided.

The decisive point, though, is what this entry is used for and what it is expressly not used for: it serves the traceability of a single action in the event of a dispute, not the ongoing observation of how fast or how often a particular person makes decisions. There is no analysis in JiCo that sets decision times or approval volumes against individual people, no league table, no dashboard that compares one employee with another. The audit trail is evidence of a single, concrete act — it is expressly not a performance statistic, and it is not technically read like one either.

Why the law on the protection of personality takes this distinction seriously

This distinction is not merely a voluntary self-commitment; it coincides with what employment law in all three German-speaking countries requires anyway. German law provides for a co-determination right (Mitbestimmungsrecht) of the works council over technical installations that are intended to monitor the conduct or performance of employees — and under the established interpretation this right applies as soon as an installation is objectively suitable for monitoring, regardless of whether monitoring was actually intended. The Swiss Code of Obligations (Obligationenrecht), with its protection of personality in the employment relationship, draws a comparable line: no monitoring of conduct by a work tool that is actually intended for something else.

This legal position is not an obstacle to be circumvented as cleverly as possible. It describes a boundary that a tool like JiCo wants to observe anyway, because it matches the product's own self-understanding: JiCo is meant to be a work tool that takes tasks off people's hands, not an instrument of control that counts along in the background.

What is quite deliberately not measured — as a point of its own

From this attitude follows a concrete, documented list of what JiCo deliberately does not measure: no individual time saving per employee, no league table by decision speed, no analysis showing who accepted or rejected how many proposals. This list is not a subordinate clause in a technical document but a separate, named point, intended precisely for this conversation with the employee representation — a concrete, verifiable answer to the question "what could you find out about us", instead of a general assurance.

The counterpart who too rarely stands at the beginning

In the order in which a company typically introduces a tool like JiCo, every role involved has a certain right of veto at a certain point in the process — the project lead wants it, the IT lead funds it, the security officer and the data protection officer can stop it. The employee representation is often brought in last in this chain, sometimes only once a pilot project is already running and the impression arises that they are merely meant to nod through what has already been decided anyway.

It is precisely this order that is worth reversing: involving the employee representation before a pilot project, not after. Not out of mere courtesy, but because an objection that comes early can still be built into the design of the rollout — whereas an objection that only comes after the start almost inevitably acts as a brake, even if it would have been exactly the same objection in substance.