Beyond the constant challenge of hiring new employees to replace those that have left, this turnover leads to other issues that managers and owner/operators must face. In this post, we’ll focus on employees’ understanding of management expectations as they pertain to quality of customer service and loss prevention.

When a new employee is hired, one of the first things that employee does is go through training. In that training period, management sets expectations of job performance that the employee is expected to meet. Once that employee completes training, there can typically be a period of good performance, followed by a slow decline into poor service, dishonesty and overall diminished performance that does not meet management expectations. Given that, at any given time, any number of employees are moving further down the path towards their six-month anniversary/exit, it can therefore be assumed that a range of attitudes towards job performance will exist within any retail or restaurant staff. This leads to a problem: social proof takes over quickly, as new employees see the bar set by their more senior co-workers. A vicious cycle begins, and soon, the time that it takes for an employee to go from a new, higher performer to an older, lower performer contracts significantly.

At this point, many managers start to look for mechanisms by which they can reinstate a culture of higher performance. This can include positive incentives, such as bonuses, or negative incentives, such as the dreaded public execution, where a particularly low performing employee (even one whose tenure is longer than 6 months) is fired for repeat infractions or more grievous events such as cash theft. Often times, these rare and sporadic mechanisms will have a near-term effect on performance, with all employees generally increasing their level of performance to either help attain a bonus collectively, or minimize the chance of being the next “public execution” individually. Soon after this near-term performance bump, however, employee behavior starts to trend back towards the mean and the status quo is reinstated.

What, then, can the smart manager do to maintain consistently high performance without resorting to erratic tactics that only lead to short-term gains? As the axiom goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Therefore, the answer is providing employees with constant awareness that they are under constant measurement – and that they will be treated appropriately for their performance (and that includes beneficial treatment for better performance).

In the past, constant measurement like this was tedious, costly, impossible, or all of these. With the advent of tools like ReTel’s ConstantAudit, however, ongoing measurement can be performed easily and at a low cost to help management keep track of critical information such as employee theft events, speed of service and consumer experience. These tools can also be used by management to provide ongoing feedback to employees to both provide awareness that measurement exists, as well as share best practices and provide benchmarks that employees can strive to meet or exceed to earn bonuses and accolades.

And, most importantly, by setting an ongoing culture of accountability in every store, the old culture of getting away with “just good enough” work rapidly disappears. New employees will be entering an environment where their peers perform at a higher level for longer periods of time, reversing the vicious cycle of diminishing performance and consistently allowing for further optimization. It takes time to achieve, but once the tipping point is reached, the results are well worth the effort.

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.