Hawthorne is in Effect

We started off the morning without our illustrious foreman. He was called over to do some work on another site. We were given several tasks to accomplish, one of which was to create one of the main walls.

We decided to tackle the wall, and all agreed to bust our humps, just to prove we don’t need the foreman’s leadership to stay productive. We made awesome progress, with every guy pulling his weight for once.

As we were finishing the wall, the foreman had arrived. Immediately, our brisk pace of the morning dropped precipitously.

The explanation lies with a study I learned of in college. (Check it out; I got something useful out of my student loan payment this month.)

There was a scientist who studied workplace behavior many years ago named Hawthorne. Hawthorne discovered that a group of workers will only work as hard as the slowest one. It has something to do with our natural instinct to try to save the weakest members of our herd, rather than leaving them behind like Wilder beasts. The phenomenon is called the Hawthorne Effect.

What we discovered this morning was that the slowest member of our group is by far the foreman. It’s hard to make a crew work hard when their leader is the biggest slacker of all.

Hawthorne’s findings were right on target because as soon as our slowest member returned, we all subconsciously returned to his pace.

If I wanted to be a slacker, this situation would be fantastic, but I’ve found in life that time moves the quickest when you’re the busiest.

If you bury yourself in things to do, you have no time to worry about how close it is to quitting time. Quitting time sneaks up on you.

Ignoring the pace of our lead, I found numerous things to accompany my time with, and the day rolled by nicely. When I stepped on the scale this evening, I saw another new low, 170 pounds even. One more pound to go and I get to see a six on my scale. 170 is good, but 169 just sounds so much better.