There’s a natural state of heightened attention to the self when we know we’re being watched, Bernstein notes. “Our practiced response become better,” he told me, “our unpracticed responses become worse.” So actions that have been drilled by the boss may well turn out better when everyone believes the boss is watching. On the other hand, for behavior that isn’t already learned—where the best response needs unselfconscious focus on the problem, and the chance to try something new without fear—being watched makes things harder. Attention that could have gone to one’s actions goes, instead, to managing the appearance of one’s actions.
The “gospel of transparency” declares that this is not a problem, because workers should stick to management’s script. But in one vast Chinese factory that Bernstein studied, workers who craftily deviated from standard procedure often improved the plant’s productivity.
People act differently when they know they are being watched. Period. Whether you are talking about the workplace, out in public, at events, etc. and the way we behave when being watched is not always in the best interests of the company or society.
There are serious ramifications to this study, in and out of the workplace.
I’m looking forward to this, for this very reason: So, if you like a tweet you just want to review later, it can show up in someone else’s timeline that you’ve liked it. For tweets you just want to come back to later but don’t necessarily agree with or endorse, that’s problematic. The “like” functionality…
I’m trying to add a bunch of stuff in one post to keep down the number of “comments” requests that go back to the server. Seems that when I get a bunch of entries on the page, the requests back to the server for comment counts are slowing down the page. Perhaps I’ll make it…
This is a really good reminder to not rely on a third-party to be the home of all of your stuff. You may end up losing it forever. Despite the constant flurries of social startups (Vine! Snapchat! TikTok! Ello! Meerkat! Peach! Path! Yo!), when the dust was blown off the chisel, the 2010s revealed that…
The problem is that to many people involved in litigation, this is too much work: “When requesting parties want all search hits in an email mailbox containing a common search term, they are asking for trouble. Requesting communications between specific people, over a set period of time, regarding specific subject matter, is one way to…
Think about how we organize our days. Is having someone sit in one place learning or working all day a recipe for mental fatigue? Of course, it is. That also means that the longer a person goes without taking some significant breaks, the less they are learning. Or, in the workplace, the more mental labor required to do your job, the more likely it is that you’ll start to make some bad decisions and mistakes after a certain point.
So those 12-hour days are probably not doing anyone any good. You’re simply doing lower-quality work instead of doing what your brain wants you to.
I think we should look at the research around sleep, mental fatigue, meeting fatigue, etc. We might just find a better way for everyone to be more successful.
They point out a hypothetical situation where the employee looks at their “work” day to include the commute and maybe some other time, but the manager isn’t. That’s a huge disconnect. Speaking for myself, I will never volunteer to go back to an in-office or even a hybrid position because of how much time you spend going back and forth and the limiting factor of needing to be in that place for the entire time in between. Why? If the work can get done from anywhere, why would we expect anyone to spend so much time going somewhere else every day?
