The Relay Room Is Still Running
In 1927, Elton Mayo’s team from Harvard was eighteen months into their study at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works plant in Chicago when they noticed something that made the data useless. They had been adjusting working conditions for six female relay assemblers: rest breaks, shift lengths, lighting, room temperature. They measured productivity after each change. Productivity went up. Every time. When they removed the rest breaks, productivity went up. When they shortened the workday, productivity went up. When they restored the original conditions, productivity stayed elevated at roughly 30 percent above the baseline. The variable they had failed to control for was the researchers themselves. The workers performed better because they were being observed, and the observation had contaminated every measurement they had taken.