that mattered. At Western Electrics Hawthorne works in Chicago in the 1920s, telephone equipment was being manufactured by 40,000 people. But Hawthorne employees had received their company paid pension plan back in 1906. They had vacations one week after five years and they had sickness disability pay. Hawthorne was considered a progressive place to work. Those who worked at Hawthorne were really respected in the neighborhoods.
It was considered quite a privilege to be working here. At this and three other companies in 1924, the National Academy of Science began an experiment to determine how illumination affects worker efficiency. The premise was that output would improve if the lighting of work areas was improved. Something very curious happened when new experimental lights were installed.
Output went up among those employees being studied, and also among those whose lighting had not been changed. And most puzzling of all, it continued to go up even when lights were turned down. Having proved nothing, these studies were called off by the National Academy. It might all have ended there. Relay making was picked for a new experiment when Western Electric alone decided to probe the inconclusive results of the illumination studies.
Six young women assembled the electromagnetic switches while rest breaks and different hours... were tried. It was the core of what would later be called the Hawthorne studies, industry's first scientific inquiry into employee attitudes.
Continuing changes in routine were freely discussed with the workers whose output as well as involvement in the project increased dramatically. Each completed relay was counted by a tireless tape which recorded an overall production increase of 30%. In this small room for more For more than five years, observers studied workers producing more in less time than ever before.
Industrial history was in the making. The Hawthorne-Harvard Cooperative Inquiry continued into the 30s, delving into production areas all over the plant. When the early returns from the relay room began to be understood, the investigators felt the attitudes of other workers ought to be explored.
They began industry's first formal employee interviewing program. Some 20,000 Hawthorne people aired their feelings about their jobs, their supervisors, their working conditions, about anything and everything. In other experiments, investigators found the first clues to the social organization of people. at work, an organization that seemed to have as much or even more impact on output than anything management did. Though not all the results were as dramatic as the relay room, in general output increased wherever these tests were tried.
The investigators found industry had never tapped the workers'real worth and sent the massive proof back to Harvard for compilation. The point of view which gradually emerged from the studies was to regard a business organization as a social system. Everyone knows that people are important in business, but a way of thinking which allowed the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of workers to be thought about in relationship to output and productivity. and to allow new studies and new actions to be taken had not been available before.
This is the real contribution of the Hawthorne studies.