A wee while ago I mentioned a paper that questioned the validity of the well known hawthorne effect.
My friend Graeme passed on this story from his time working in a fish factory, which seemed kinda relevant:
A factory I worked for consistently processed 50,000kg of raw product per day. One day the amplifier had a hernia and the radio stopped
playing in the factory. As relaying broadcast vhf signals was not part of our core business, repairing it was relgated to the bottom of the
factory maintenance to-do list. After 3-4 days production started to decline. This was initially put down to a drop in quality of the raw material. After 2 weeks, production was down to 40,000kg with good quality input.
The factory manager asked me what was going on. I replied: "How should I know? I just collate the data and give you the reports." He said: "Stop being smart. You worked in the factory for 8 years, what do you think is wrong?"
I told him: "The radio is broken. They're bored out of their brains, and are fooling around instead of working."I guess that his work, as a manager, was so different from that done by the guys cutting up fish that he just couldn’t see this perspective. He suggested that the staff were a pack of sad bastards if all it took to make them work faster was some crap music and did nothing about it.
But, the factory is incredibly boring. Wherever you look, all you can see is stainless steel machinery, white painted walls, and 150 people dressed in white boots, white overalls and white hats. Oh, and it stinks of fish.
Without the radio, all that can be heard is 40-odd hydraulic motors churning away, water being squirted around at12,000psi and occasionally a steel pallet being dropped on the concrete floor. Wearing earmuffs, you can hardly hear the person next to speaking.
When I worked in the factory I found that, with some practice, you do the job on autopilot. The music is like Peter Pan's 'happy thought', taking you away from the misery. Without the radio as a distraction, all you can do is stare at the product on the conveyor belts and think is 'C'mon Brucie, where's the cuddly toy?'
That weekend a new amplifier was installed, and by Wednesday the factory was back to full speed.
