The quest for a proper understanding of the links between the places we work, the things with which we fill them and our wellbeing and productivity has been ongoing for a very long time. It predates our current thinking on productive workplace design and the facilities management discipline as we now know it by decades and has its roots in the design of early landmark offices such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin building and research such as that carried out at the Hawthorne Works in Chicago in the late 1920s. Yet the constantly evolving nature of work means that we are forever tantalised by an idea that we can never fully grasp and makes established ideas seem like revelations.

The Hawthorne work has become seminal not only in the study of productivity and ergonomics, but also in wider management thinking in that while it was initially interpreted as proof that an increase in illumination in a factory improved productivity levels, things were a bit more complex than that. Subsequent experiments at the same site on the effects of changes like maintaining clean work stations, clearing floors of obstacles, and even relocating workstations also yielded increases in productivity.

When it was discovered that productivity fell back to some degree at the end of the experiments, a second interpretation was postulated; namely that the workers were not merely responding to better conditions but also to the experiment itself. They liked the attention. And so The Hawthorne Effect was born.

If the Hawthorne experiment proved anything it was that people don’t like being disengaged from work and like to know that their employers are paying attention to them and their wellbeing. The better lighting in the experiment was welcomed and had a role to play, but there was a complex process going on. The lighting itself was not enough without the management and the focus on the individual. We’d take that thinking for granted nowadays to some extent, but then it must have been revolutionary.