Ducks in a Row: the Case Against Surveillance
by Miki Saxon
There are two types of managers, those who believe that productivity improves through constant oversight and those who don’t.
And for those who do there is an abundance of new technology that fosters increased worker surveillance.
Until now it’s been more of a philosophical argument, but new research is working to quantify it and so far it seems that less is more.
Trusting workers to help each other, be creative, solve problems and find better ways of doing things has typically been the province of knowledge workers.
But Ethan S. Bernstein, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, did his initial research with workers at a giant factory in China and the results were surprising.
The small amount of privacy the experiment created yielded a 10-15% percent productivity hike against other workers in the same factory.
“Creating zones of privacy may, under certain conditions, increase performance.” The right degree of privacy, he added, can foster “productive deviance, localized experimentation, distraction avoidance and continuous improvement.”
Bernstein’s research will only get more interesting and relevant to higher-level employees.
Since the factory project, Mr. Bernstein has conducted research studying the privacy-transparency trade-off in other settings, including biotechnology labs and service businesses. That research is not yet published, but Mr. Bernstein said the results so far point to “larger effects” than in manufacturing.
This isn’t rocket science to good managers, but it’s always nice to have your methods validated by Harvard research.
What it boils down to is that you should give your people all the information, authority and support necessary to do their job well and then get the hell out of the way and let them do it—often more efficiently and with better results than expected.
Flickr image credit: laurawashere95
