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.

There’s an explanatory note at the bottom of Shead’s post pointing out the original tests were to do with changing light levels. You can read Shead’s original story at Hawthorne Effect : Productivity501.

It’s also worth reading the Wikipedia entry on the Hawthorne effect. There’s also a good definition of the effect 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 gave birth to the idea of industrial psychology.

My own common sense experience as a manager says you should be paying 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 and new. My view is that if the Hawthorne effect is apparent among knowledge workers at your workplace, it’s a sign you aren’t managing people correctly.

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

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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 industrial era 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 certainly doesn’t have a place in the knowledge economy.

Knowledge work is different

You can’t hurry or streamline true knowledge work in the same way you can automate car manufacturing. Of course this hasn’t stopped managers from trying.

Whitehead’s story 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 in many circumstances what often looks like slacking; long conversations in the tearoom, cafe meetings and even leaving the office early for drinks with colleagues and customers can be as productive as slaving over a hot computer.

Building relations, shooting the breeze and exchanging ideas are often important aspects of creative knowledge work.

What’s more, it’s 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.

Reach Further » Combating Digital Taylorism – valuing the individual