The messaging software company Slack is working on software
that will install manager bots to monitor employee production. The bots will be
plugged into company networks to monitor an employee’s work. The bots will ask
for updates, check employees work status, and even ask what tasks are currently
being worked. Managers won’t have to roam the cube farms to keep everyone on
point. The bots will do it.
Does this help or hurt employee morale and productivity? Do
companies that are constantly looking over employee shoulders getting the
results they want?
Many in the workforce have been exposed to a micro manager.
Constantly overlooking every detail of an employee’s work. Workers usually
respond with frustration or task-to-task completion without innovation. Doing
only what has to be done to satisfy the manager, waiting to be told what to do
next. The last decade has seen the use of technology to replace that micro
manager.
Long before the idea of manager bots technology enabled
companies to monitor almost every aspect of a worker’s day. Most, if not all,
companies that have computer networks monitor employee email traffic and
Internet use. Some even capture keystrokes and keyboard activity, such as how
long a keyboard has been inactive. Software enables managers to monitor
telecommuters-are they actively working or just logged in to the network? Companies
that utilize vehicles track employees through GPS, recording location and
length of stay. Hospitals track nurses through the use of sensors embedded to
monitor their location and patient visits. And let’s not forget about cameras. With
or without using a computer, workers are constantly tracked. How the use of
monitoring occurs and is communicated to workers can have varied results.
Hawthorne Effect
Workers who are knowingly being observed tend to be more
productive due to what has been called the Hawthorne effect. The Hawthorne effect
is used to describe the tendency of observed employees to work harder due to
the attention they are receiving from researchers rather than because of individual
work habits.
The Hawthorne Effect is named for the location
where worker productivity experiments took place in the 1920’s and 1930’s,
Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works near Hawthorne, Illinois. The electric
company had commissioned research to determine if there was a relationship
between productivity and the work environment. The focus of the studies was to
determine if increasing or decreasing the amount of light that workers received
would have an effect on worker productivity. Employee productivity seemed to
increase due to the changes but then decreased after the experiment was over. Researchers
suggested that productivity increased due to attention from the research team
and not because of changes in the experimental variables.
Transparency Trap
Ethan Bernstein, assistant professor of business
administration at Harvard Business School has extensively researched employee
monitoring. Bernstein believes that it is difficult for employees to be at
their best when they know they are being watched and evaluated at every moment.
Bernstein wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “Wide open workspaces and
copious real time data on how individuals spend their time can leave employees
feeling exposed and vulnerable.” For his paper, The Transparency Trap,
Bernstein conducted several experiments to help prove his theory. In one, Bernstein
embedded five Chinese born Harvard undergraduate researchers into the lines of
the world's second largest mobile phone factory in China. Controls were added
to allow for the Hawthorne Effect.
This particular experiment showed that employees acted and behaved
differently when they were being watched. Basically, observed employees followed the policies of
the company to the letter while unobserved employees did not. Unobserved
employees innovated ways to make their tasks easier, tending to hide process
improvements from managers. Two examples were scanning multiple bar codes at
once instead of one at time as per policy and crossed trained themselves on
breaks. The intent was to improve the process without having the inefficiency
of explaining their actions to managers.
Overall, those shielded from observation were more
productive than the observed. Experimentation, shared problem solving, and
focus flourished.
Communication
There are many examples of employee monitoring.
Done improperly, with poor communication to employees may cause resentment and
a feeling of “Big Brother” is watching. Letting workers know that data is being
collected to improve efficiency may alleviate skewed results. UPS has saved
millions and improved their schedules by collecting delivery data and providing
the analysis back to drivers. You may have heard of how UPS routes were made
more efficient by reducing left turns.
Letting employees know that monitoring is
taking place, how the data is being used, and how that will improve their
workday goes a long way is establishing trust between employer and employee.
Will employees do their best when being
observed? Or are they so hindered by the constant oversight that they do the
minimum required. If left to themselves would they perform better, working more
efficiently with less fear of messing up and being corrected by managers?
These questions that are still being studied.
From what is known, it seems that communication between management and the
workforce about the use of technology to monitor productivity is a key factor
for improvement. Technology will always continue to improve. Innovators will
figure out how to apply technology to the workplace. But while people are still
involved they need to be kept in the loop.
