Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ethan S. Bernstein explains why decreasing workplace transparency can increase productivity.
Companies all over the world have striven for transparency in the workplace, literally tearing down walls in an effort to let managers and employees observe each other. Take, for example, one of the 14 key principles of The Toyota Way, Toyota Motor Corp.'s managerial philosophy: "Use visual control so no problems are hidden."
But recent research proves the virtue of letting employees do at least some work unobserved. In a series of studies, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ethan S. Bernstein shows that decreasing the observation of employees can increase their productivity.
What's more, in a curious phenomenon dubbed the Transparency Paradox, he finds that watching your employees less closely at work might yield more transparency at your organization.
Bernstein uncovered the paradox while studying the manufacturing floor at a leading, technologically advanced global contract manufacturer's plant in Southern China, where tens of thousands of workers assembled mobile devices under close supervision. The plant for years had operated myriad identical assembly lines, spaced closely together to facilitate visibility. The idea was that watching the workers would help managers improve operations and replicate innovations on one line across others, thus increasing productivity and driving down production costs.
A research team found the opposite was true.
WHAT MANAGERS SAW WASN'T REAL
In the summers of 2008 and 2009, when he was a doctoral candidate at HBS, Bernstein hired a team of five Chinese-born Harvard undergraduates to be "embeds" at the plant. They lived in factory dorms and worked alongside employees, who assumed that the embedded students were actual employees, too.
In terms of respecting boundaries, it's important that managers consider not only individual privacy but group privacy as well, Bernstein explains. The curtain boosted productivity for a few key reasons: It provided privacy to tweak (and improve) line operations as temporary issues arose; it prevented unproductive distractions and provided workers with increased focus; and it let the line experiment with new ideas prior to explaining them to management. Indeed, the workers did purposefully share ideas with their supervisors after testing and perfecting them.
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.