Back in the 1920s, a series of experiments to establish how changes in workplace conditions affected productivity took place at the factory of Western Electric, an electrical engineering company, in the Chicago suburb of Hawthorne. Its conclusions became known as the Hawthorne Effect, and it remains one of the most significant and influential studies on workplace behaviour.
We do not know whether, in any way, it helped inform Labour’s proposed wide-ranging reforms of employment laws outlined in the King’s Speech, but what the Hawthorne experiments were able to demonstrate was that an individual’s productivity bore a direct relationship to their working conditions.
This may seem like an obvious point to make, but it was the first time that the industrial world was given cause to consider business efficiency from an employee’s point of view, and shaped what was then a revolutionary hypothesis: that an improvement in the working environment – even simple things like better lighting on the shop floor, and longer breaks – would benefit both the company and the worker, and would consequently have a positive societal effect.
And here we are, a century or so later, deep in the particulars of this very subject again, with a key plank of our current Labour Government’s legislative agenda being a series of measures to rebalance power in the workplace.
The predisposition to welcome the moves to end exploitative zero-hours contracts, ban the arbitrary changing of a worker’s pay and conditions, and make sick pay available from day one of any job, may depend on whether you are an employee or an employer, but we should all be able to agree that the world of work has changed so radically since the pandemic that a new settlement in labour relations is important.
One proposal that it seems the Government will not enshrine in law is the worker’s “right to switch off” by not answering emails or undertaking tasks outside normal working hours, or while on holiday. While this is a change that Labour appears to be keen on – its manifesto highlighted the need to prevent homes from “turning into 24/7 offices” – it was not mentioned in the King’s Speech, and, for the time being, we are not destined to follow the example of France, where, since 2017, it has been illegal for a business with more than 50 workers to contact an employee out of hours.
It is more likely to be included in a new code of practice for businesses, but I fail to understand why the Government wouldn’t make this a legal obligation. France, which has a 35-hour working week as well as greater protections for employees, can boast much higher productivity rates than the UK: according to the most recent ONS study, France is around 18 per cent more productive than we are as a nation.
Other countries where employees also have the right to disconnect, like Belgium and Ireland, have, similarly, better productivity rates than the UK, with Ireland having doubled its productivity since the 1990s when more enlightened labour relations laws were introduced.
Employers complain that, in the post-pandemic world, the balance has swung too much towards the employee, with flexible working, and the dispensation to work from home, treated as de facto entitlements for most workers. But the Government is on to something when it identifies the danger to everyone, and to society at large, if the lines between home and office become increasingly blurred.
The only way to prevent this is either to get people back to a communal place of work (and the ship may have already sailed in this respect, at least for a generation) or to impose strict guidelines on working hours.
Business leaders may think they are being shortchanged when Zoom calls are constantly interrupted by the arrival of an Amazon driver, or when employees are patently not at their work stations, but these are relatively minor irritations. If the delineation between work and free time is eroded, the effect on our collective mental health is potentially disastrous, with the possibility of a further reduction in overall productivity.
The Government should legislate for the right to switch off. As the Hawthorne Effect demonstrated, a happy worker is a productive worker.