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HAVING someone “peer over your shoulder” while you work doesn’t improve your
output—it’s official.

When Jeffrey Stanton of Syracuse University in New York and Amanda Julian of
Somerville and Company in Denver looked at how electronic monitoring affects
work performance, they found that employers’ efforts at improving output often
backfire. They asked 134 volunteers to carry out a data correction task on a
computer and told them their work would be monitored for both quality and
quantity. However, automated cues flashed up during the tasks that suggested
they were being monitored for quality rather than quantity, or vice versa.

Despite being told that both quality and quantity were being monitored,
participants tended to concentrate on what they believed was being monitored at
each stage of the trial.

“If you measure quantity and ignore quality, you’ll get a lot of poor or
marginal output,” says Stanton. Similarly, if you emphasise quality then you
shouldn’t expect good productivity.

What the research exposes, says Stanton, is how employees will treat a
monitored workstation as an embodiment of managerial policy and decision
making—they will do what they are told and nothing more. He also warns
that employees will react this way to surveillance techniques other than
computer monitoring. Video cameras, position monitoring and electronic clocking
could all have the same effect.

This shows just how important trust is in the workplace, says Stanton. “The
greater the use of employers’ monitoring and surveillance techniques, the
greater the climate of mistrust within the organisation,” he explains.