Employee monitoring, divine observation, and the Hawthorne effect
If we're more productive when someone is watching, what happens when we stop believing in them?
I grew up in a church where God the all-powerful was a surrounding and encompassing force. The Father was loving, compassionate, and wanted only the best for His children. Like all children, however, we were not entirely to be trusted with our own rational decision-making, managing our time, or keeping filthy things out of our mouths.
One Sunday morning when I was fifteen years old, as the eldest son of the pastor, I was given the solemn task of nursery-keeping when a mother in the congregation wanted to attend the sermon. Spending a quiet hour with a single one-year-old was an otherwise unremarkable act of babysitting, but it was never more apparent that the baby (today a twenty-something named Katie) could not be out of my direct attention for more than seconds. Immature humans require constant oversight. Our teachers made it clear that even if we were alone, God was watching us. This was no implicit threat: while God was merciful and forgiving to those that repented our natural disbelief and impure inclinations, His omniscience also kept a perfect ledger of our actions, even our thoughts, and would one day call for a reckoning. God, we were informed, was perfectly capable of executing His judgment in this life, although the real existential dread lay somewhere in the meticulously described afterlife of Milton, Dante, and the Biblical book of Revelations. A perfect Heaven awaited those who cleared the bar for self-sacrifice and acceptance of His will. A monstrous Hell was the fate of all others, who would constitute the vast majority of humanity. I am using the past tense for God here because I no longer share my parents’ religion and have not since at least college, although I retain some of their capacity for faith. Today my conception of the divine is considerably more abstract.
The “Protestant work ethic” is one of the core principles underlying American vocation, perhaps of capitalism itself. The Founding Fathers put forward an egalitarian perspective in which it was every man’s imperative (and they said men, specifically) to out-compete other men in terms of prosperity and happiness. God’s role in this journey was as a gracious helper and moral provider. Those that worked hard would succeed not only in achieving abundance, but also in pleasing God, ensuring a ticket to glorious immortality.
In 1927, supervisors at the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois allowed researchers led by psychologist Elton Mayo to study the workers assembling telephone relays in the Hawthorne Works factory. The researchers were initially studying the impact of light on worker performance. However, they ultimately found that workers achieved higher rates of production regardless of how much light each received. Their interpretation of these results was that the increased attention paid to workers as a result of the presence of the researchers themselves, and associated interest in the workers’ occupational lives, was the cause of the increased productivity. They worked harder because they were being observed.
The Hawthorne Effect introduces a confounding variable in modern psychological studies, which can threaten their validity. If both control and experimental groups modify their behavior simply because they are being observed, it becomes difficult to determine if any changes are due to the actual experimental intervention. This makes it challenging to establish true causal relationships between variables, and obscures the impact of the treatment. The effect decreases with time and familiarity, as workers adjust to the new reality. But it doesn’t entirely subside — productivity does remain measurably higher in the presence of observation — and if performance is the goal, not the experiment, that makes employee monitoring the solemn duty of all God-fearing corporations.
An additional variable is covert observation, which can help mitigate the Hawthorne effect in research, but productivity is something employers are obsessed with maximizing, not diminishing. “Authentic” observation may introduce ethical considerations in psychological studies, but corporate management have no such compunctions. After all, what is monitoring good for if it can’t be used to alter, or punish, behavior? And if employees aren’t aware that they might be watched, how would they know when to be complying with their superiors’ every well-compensated desire?
Much has been made of police surveillance and the Panopticon-like nature of the modern urban landscape. Governments are less concerned with their citizens’ public displays of productivity than their adherence to lawful and orderly conduct, although this line tends to get a bit blurry when it comes to sleeping on street benches or teenage loitering. Being poor, or just immaturely useless, is so close to being criminal in the United States as makes almost no difference. But employees can’t vote against the installation of cameras or monitoring software, and in fact opt in to these practices, either in the office or at home, with their acceptance of a regular paycheck. Unions are raising concerns about these practices, especially when it comes to using monitoring to disrupt union activities, and play a vital role in pushback against the more egregious forms of surveillance becoming commonplace in the corporate or municipal sphere.
Direct observation as a form of accountability or control is ultimately counterproductive, because forced suppression of agency becomes anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Accountability should happen through establishing intentions and checking work against clearly expressed — and documented — expectation, not through controlling every moment of someone’s time. As a manager, the way to encourage performance is to align people with the organizational mission, give them purpose, and a part to play in the story. Enforcing work ethic through fear and retribution leads to burnout, mental health issues, and, well, suffering. Unless you think anyone who doesn’t embody Puritan work values is fundamentally lazy, I guess.