Treating employees well is not just the right thing to do, it might help business.
In a famous 1920s experiment, Western Electric changed the lighting at its plant in Hawthorne, Illinois. It found making the room brighter improved productivity.
While that makes sense, it was a lot more complex than it looked. They turned the lights down again, and productivity improved even more.
Western Electric also varied other employee benefits like break times. In each case, changes increased output. The effect faded with time, but something had obviously happened.
The conclusion: it wasn’t so much the changes, but that workers saw management paying attention to them. They worked more efficiently when they thought the company cared about their comfort.
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