The new workers on the line were not who they seemed. In the summers of 2008 and 2009, five Chinese-born Harvard undergraduates took jobs at a huge factory in southern China, where tens of thousands of people assembled mobile devices under close supervision. They lived in the factory dorms and worked alongside everyone else. Their coworkers assumed they were ordinary employees.
They had been hired by Ethan Bernstein, then a doctoral candidate at Harvard, to see how the work actually got done.
The first lesson came quickly. Coworkers showed the newcomers a “ton of little tricks” that kept production going, ways of doing the job faster or more easily than the official procedure allowed. The second lesson came right after: whenever the managers came around, stop, “because they’ll get mad.”
Veterans advised working strictly by the book whenever a manager was in sight. The researchers noticed that production seemed to slow down whenever the workers knew they were being watched.
The workers had their reasons. “Because there is so much variation, we need to fix first, explain later,” one said. Another described the arrangement as a truce that suited everyone: “Management sees what they want to see, and we meet our production quantity and quality targets.”
So Bernstein tried something that ran against the way the factory was run. The factory ran 16 lines making mobile data cards, each on a day and a night shift. Management hung curtains around two of them, so four of the 32 line-shifts worked out of view.
Within a week, defect-free output per hour on the curtained lines rose by as much as 10 to 15 percent, and they stayed ahead of the other 28 for the rest of the five-month experiment. It matched something one of the observers had overheard a worker say: the team would do better if it could be hidden from the rest of the factory.
Behind the curtain, a line could adjust when something went wrong without stopping to explain. Ideas got tested before anyone showed them to management. When they did reach the supervisors, Bernstein saw “a pride in ownership leading to the desire to share.”
He published the work in 2012 as “The Transparency Paradox.”“What managers were seeing wasn’t real,” he said later. “It was a show being put on for an audience.”