Silver Clipboard

Beware the Hawthorne Effect: Why You Feel More Productive When You Try a New System and Why it Doesn’t Last

Between 1924 and 1932 the Hawthorne Works Telephone Factory commissioned a series of experiments on their workers. The owners wanted to find out what environment would make the workers most productive. While the researchers never did figure out the best environment, they did stumble on one of the most famous effects in psychology.

The researchers thought that the low light levels inside the factory might be making the workers inefficient, so the first thing the researchers did was brighten the place. Worker productivity increased — but only for a little while. As good scientists, they also tried the opposite. To their surprise, darkening the factory floor also increased productivity. What was going on?

After a number of other experiments, the researchers determined the real cause of temporary productivity increase was change. Any change in environment produces a temporary gain in productivity. It matters not if the change is actually beneficial in the long run.

What causes this effect is still a bit of a debate, but one theory is that changing the environment made the workers more aware of their surroundings, and by extension themselves and their work, hence productivity increases. Once the workers familiarized with the change, the productivity gains disappeared.

Does this sound familiar? Remember how productive and organized you felt the first week after you bought your new computer or new phone? Remember how that feeling slowly disappeared? The Hawthorne Effect at work.

I suspect that much of the self-help industry relies, unknowingly, on the Hawthorne Effect. A new book about getting organized, managing your finances, or losing weight is able to generate enormous buzz because, for the people who try it, it works just long enough to get the book recommended. By the time the reader realizes that their weight has come back, their debt hasn’t gone away, or they are just as disorganized as before, it’s too late.

Just because the Hawthorne Effect exists doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t bother making changes in your life — it just means that it’s harder to tell, in the short term, if the system really works or not. You need to make deliberate changes.

Whenever you change something in your organizational system, or your life, beware the Hawthorne Effect and ask yourself several questions:

1) Does this change to the system actually make things easier?

2) Is this change less effort to implement than the previous system?

3) If it’s more effort, am I sure that it’s worth it?

Good luck with making changes, beware the Hawthorn Effect and don’t fool yourself.

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Header photograph by aussiegall