In our last blog post, we spoke briefly about The Hawthorne Effect and how ReTel’s surveillance auditing services can be used as a mechanism to trigger it. In the post, we’ll dig a little bit deeper into the origins of The Hawthorne Effect, how it works, and case studies that reveal its power in operationally-driven environments, such as quick serve restaurants (QSRs) and convenience stores.

The History Of The Hawthorne Effect

At its simplest, The Hawthorne Effect can be described as a change in the performance of subjects under observation, simply because they are aware that they are being observed. In studies performed in the 1920s, researchers were baffled when upticks in performance during a study suddenly disappeared when the study was complete. As it turns out, the test changes made to the observed participants environments had only a nominal effect on their behavior; rather, it was the observation itself that truly had an impact on their performance.

How It Works & Why It Works

In many instances prior to observation, participants in studies were either unaware of their performance and therefore unable to understand whether it was good or bad, or they were aware of their performance but made no special effort to improve it because there was no means of measuring it, and therefore no incentives or punishments based on that performance. Once observation was established, however, participants became more aware of their behaviors, modifying it either explicitly or unknowingly to a higher level of performance. As those early studies showed, as soon as the observation or measurement mechanism was removed, performance soon slipped back to previous, lower levels.

Examples of The Hawthorne Effect in the QSR and Convenience Store Industries

Perhaps the most well known use of The Hawthorne Effect in these industries is with drive thru timers. Prior to the existence of drive thru timers, franchisors and franchisees had no way of understanding speed of service at the drive thru. By default, then, they had no way of providing employees with timing benchmarks or awareness of their performance at the drive thru.

With the installation of drive thru timing devices, certain chains saw an overall reduction of up to 29 seconds per order during peak rush times. Chains such as McDonald’s estimated that for every 6 seconds saved at the drive thru, unit sales increased by as much as 1%. It’s easy to see the impact that an improvement like this can have on a high-volume business such as a QSR.

What is interesting to note about these drive thru timers is that they do nothing else but provide highly visible evidence that the drive thru is under observation for speed of service. It is simply by knowing that they are being measured that the drive thru crews increase performance, which therefore increases sales.

Applying the Power of The Hawthorne Effect Elsewhere

ReTel’s advanced auditing technologies allow organizations to put the power of The Hawthorne Effect to work anywhere in their organization. Similar to the above example, ReTel’s customers have been able to realize significant gains in performance simply by measuring and providing awareness of measurement.