[eli-bryan]

There's a researcher, Ethan Bernstein, who has looked into this quite a bit and has some great stories about the ways close monitoring can (sometimes) go sideways. He did a fascinating history of it here: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/BernsteinE-M...

A representative anecdote re: a factory workfloor: "First the [embedded researchers] were quietly shown ‘‘better ways’’ of accomplishing tasks by their peers — a ‘‘ton of little tricks’’ that ‘‘kept production going’’ or enabled ‘‘faster, easier, and / or safer production.’’ Then they were told, ‘‘Whenever the [customers / managers / leaders] come around, don’t do that, because they’ll get mad.’’ Instead, when under observation, embeds were trained in the art of appearing to perform the task the way it was ‘‘meant’’ to be done according to the codified process rules posted for each task. Because many of these performances were not as productive as the ‘‘little tricks,’’ I observed line performance actually dropping when lines were actively supervised." From "The Transparency Paradox": https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000183921245302...

I've also interviewed a few engineers about this recently and there are plenty of horror stories. My favorite 2 quotes (from the same person) about screenshot monitoring freelancers: "It almost uniformly led to worse work..." and "... but my boss loved it." https://medium.com/@elibryan/employee-performance-tracking-d...