Pay Attention to Your Employees!

I still smirk each time I remember the comment of an employee on his Annual Performance Appraisal – “Pay Attention to Me.”

I must say though, since that first time, I have seen it several times after. Employees are becoming more alert and are a lot more vocal when it comes to demanding what they want out of their supervisors. Attention seems to have always been top on the list. Have you heard of The Hawthorne Effect? It is a term referring to the tendency of some people to work harder and perform better due to additional attention.

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Western Electric’s company in Hawthorne Illinois commissioned research to determine if there was a relationship between productivity and work environments. The original study was to examine how different aspects of the work environment, such as lighting, timing of breaks and the length of the workday, have on workers productivity.

In the ‘most famous’ of the experiments, the focus of the study was to determine if increasing or decreasing the amount of light that workers received would influence how productive they were during their shifts. However, employees’ productivity seemed to increase due to the changes but decreased once the experiment was over.

The researchers in the original studies discovered that nearly every change to the experimental conditions led to increases in productivity. For example, when lighting was decreased to the levels of candlelight, production increased. Production also improved when breaks were eliminated entirely and when the workday was lengthened.

The results were unexpected and caused researchers to conclude that workers were responding to the increased attention from their supervisors. Therefore, researchers suggested that productivity increased due to attention and not because of changes in the experimental variables. Henry A Landsberger who first discovered the effect in the 1950s defined the Hawthorne effect as a short-term improvement in the performance caused by observing workers.

In a book Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World. Coauthor Ashley Goodall said, “The science on human development has found that people don’t grow when you don’t pay attention to them.”

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Source: Verywell Mind