Mark Shead at Productivity 501 writes:

The Hawthorne effect refers to some studies that were done on how training impacts employees’ productivity at work. The studies found that sending someone to training produces employees that work harder. The funny part about it is that you still get the productivity increase even if the training doesn’t teach them how to be better at their jobs. Sending someone to training helps them feel like they are important, like the company is investing in them and they are valuable. Because of this, they work harder.

Shead says the original tests were to do with changing light levels. You can read Shead’s story at Hawthorne Effect : Productivity501.

Wikipedia's entry on the Hawthorne effect is also worth reading.

There’s also a good definition at Donald Clark’s site: The Hawthorne effect.

Clark writes:

The Hawthorne effect – an increase in worker productivity produced by the psychological stimulus of being singled out and made to feel important.

Clarke links The Hawthorne effect to work done by Frederick Taylor who invented industrial psychology.

My common sense management experience says you should pay attention to workers as a matter of course.

Sadly this isn’t obvious to everyone and it certainly wasn’t back in the 1920s and 1930s when these ideas were fresh. My view is if you see the Hawthorne effect at your workplace, take it as a sign you aren’t managing correctly.

See also: Taylor’s scientific management doesn’t apply to knowledge work.

When Frederick Taylor wrote The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, it made sense.

Taylor thought management could be rationalised. He invented the time and motion study. He taught managers to develop clear and repeatable workflow processes. He saw factory workers as machines.

It took a while, but his ideas were picked-up by people like Henry Ford. Industries changed radically and fortunes made.

Scientific management helped the west win a world war and stay powerful well into the 1970s and 1980s. It lives on today in industrial workplaces. Maybe it still has a place in factories and sweat shops. Yet, as Helen Whitehead from the Reach Further website explains, it doesn’t have a place in the knowledge economy.

Knowledge workers are different

You can’t hurry or streamline knowledge work in the same way you can automate a car factory. This hasn’t stopped managers from trying.

Whitehead mentions dehumanising digital surveillance technologies like keystroke logging and email monitoring as examples of digital taylorism. They are all nasty and ultimately counter productive.

I’d go further and say that often what looks like slacking; long chats in the tea room, café meetings and even leaving the office early for drinks with colleagues and customers is as productive as slaving over a hot computer.

Building relations, shooting the breeze and exchanging ideas are part of creative knowledge work.

What’s more, it is a bit rich for an employer who expects staff to work unpaid overtime, accept business calls and deal with email at all hours of the day and night to object to personal phone calls.

Make that a bit rich and counter-productive.