Workers sped up during the pilot. Was it the change?

Question

A factory pilots a new assembly workflow on one team. The team knows it is the closely monitored pilot group, and output rises 8 percent. Management concludes the new workflow raises productivity.

Why might the 8 percent overstate the workflow's true effect, and how would you design around it?

Accepted Answer

Being observed changes behavior. People often work harder or more carefully simply because they know they are being watched and are part of a special study, an effect named after the Hawthorne factory experiments. So the pilot team's 8 percent gain may come partly from the attention and novelty, not from the workflow itself. This is a close cousin of the placebo effect: the act of being singled out for an intervention produces a boost of its own. The fix: a control group under the same spotlight. Pick two similar teams at random. Give one the new workflow and leave the other on the old workfl…

Workers sped up during the pilot. Was it the change?

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