# AT&T Archives: The Year They Discovered People

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3pDWt7GntI

[00:02] Betty Woods of the State Street Council and lots of activities happening during people week along State Street.
[00:06] This is [inaudible]...WBBM Chicago.
[00:15] Well I was an observer stationed in the test room during the experiments, and my job was to keep accurate records of all that happened, create and maintain a friendly atmosphere, and exercise partial supervisory function.
[00:36] When they asked me would I like to work in a test room, I thought it was gonna be something different than what they were doing.
[00:41] My name was Theresa Lehmann at that time.
[00:46] Well we liked it.
[00:46] All of us liked it.
[00:54] You know, every day we had to do something different.
[00:54] It wasn't the same thing over and over.
[00:58] We had men working with us, Mr. Highberger and Mr. Chipman, mostly Mr. Chipman.
[00:58] He was there with us.
[01:04] All the time.
[01:04] He was nice.
[01:04] He was real nice.
[01:04] Hi Mr. Chipman.
[01:04] Hi [inaudible]!
[01:04] Are you in to see the old game?
[01:11] I sure am.
[01:11] Did you ever hear of the Hawthorne studies?
[01:18] It probably is in a textbook on human relations.
[01:18] It doesn't mention the Hawthorne studies.
[01:22] 1924 was the year it started.
[01:22] It all happened at this plant, the Hawthorne Works.
[01:40] [Theresa] Hi!
[01:40] [laughing]
[01:43] [camera click] Theresa!
[01:46] [indistinct chatter]
[01:49] [Man] How are you?
[01:49] [Theresa] Oh just fine.
[01:49] [Man] You look like the blushing bride.
[01:52] [Theresa] [laughs]
[01:55] Hi Mr. [inaudible].
[01:57] [Indistinct chatter]
[01:57] [Theresa] Oh no that's my book.
[01:57] [laughter]
[02:01] [Theresa] My pictures.
[02:03] [Man] Oh your pictures.
[02:04] [Indistinct chatter]
[02:15] You know, this is really a fun deal to get together with a gang like this that you haven't seen for so long.
[02:18] [Woman] Oh it is.
[02:22] [Man] When is Theresa gonna show us what she has in the book there?
[02:27] [Man] Yeah that's a pretty impressive looking book.
[02:31] [Theresa] Oh some old-time pictures... [inaudible].
[02:31] This is me.
[02:44] I was maybe about 18 years old on that picture.
[02:44] [Woman] Now what year would these be?
[02:47] The roaring 20s, an era of excitement like few others in American history, an era of uproar in well, everything.
[02:55] A scandalous dance called the Charleston caught on bringing hemlines up so they could swing to the new music.
[03:01] Ladies bobbed their hair and
[03:05] Covered it with cloche hats.
[03:12] The noble experiment tried vainly to erase demon drink from America.
[03:16] Speakeasies, though, became as common as prohibition agents, and bootleggers were both the heroes and the villains of the age.
[03:20] Scarface Al Capone was a legendary example.
[03:26] Harding headlined the executive branch and teapot dome, but America kept cool with Coolidge.
[03:32] A young pilot named Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop across the Atlantic and shrank the world, earning its lasting adulation.
[03:46] The incomparable Babe Ruth, too, is known and loved throughout the world.
[04:00] But perhaps the grandest star of the era was the automobile.
[04:04] Nothing in the 20s revolutionized the lifestyle of Americans more than the incredible motorcar.
[04:04] Henry Ford's development of the.
[04:11] Assembly line boosted both employment and wages and set off the modern American industrial revolution.
[04:23] Everywhere, more and more people went to work in factories, turning out products by the hundreds of millions, but somewhere along the assembly line, the workers often got lost in the rush of production.
[04:33] Considered an extension of the machinery, the industrial man was often less important than his output.
[04:38] Working conditions were difficult, supervision usually autocratic, and benefits non-existent for most workers.
[04:46] In sweatshops and even in better factories, it was production that mattered.
[04:51] At Western Electrics Hawthorne Works in Chicago in the 1920s, telephone equipment was being manufactured by 40,000 people, but Hawthorne employees had received their company paid pension plan back in 1906.
[05:02] They had vacations one week after five years, and they had sickness.
[05:13] Disability pay.
[05:13] Hawthorne was considered a progressive place to work.
[05:19] Those who worked at Hawthorne were really respected in the -- in the neighborhood.
[05:27] It was considered quite a privilege to be working here.
[05:34] At this and three other companies in 1924, the National Academy of Science began an experiment to determine how illumination affects worker efficiency.
[05:44] The premise was that output would improve if the lighting of work areas was improved.
[05:50] Something very curious happened when new experimental lights were installed.
[05:56] Output went up among those employees being studied and also among those whose lighting had not been changed, and most puzzling of all, it continued to go up even when lights were turned down.
[06:06] Having proved nothing, these studies were called off by the National Academy.
[06:12] It might all have ended there.
[06:12] [Man] Looks like a good cigar.
[06:21] Ah, that's a Dandy.
[06:23] We're talking about the 20s.
[06:23] Oh the 20s.
[06:23] Oh that's in another era.
[06:29] Yeah that's the test room there.
[06:29] Let's open it to that cuz that's the -- that's the test room group.
[06:34] Now that is the heart of the study.
[06:37] Chip where were you then?
[06:40] I was over in this direction in front of the girls.
[06:40] What position did you have Theresa?
[06:44] Back there in the middle.
[06:44] The blonde there.
[06:48] The chute.
[06:48] Can you see the chute on there?
[06:50] Oh here they are.
[06:50] I remember when they dropped...
[06:54] Relay making was picked for a new experiment when Western Electric alone decided to probe the inconclusive results of the illumination studies.
[07:05] Six young women assembled the electromagnetic switches while rest brakes and different hours were tried.
[07:09] It was the core of what would later be called the Hawthorne studies, industry's first scientific inquiry into employee attitudes.
[07:18] Continuing changes in routine were freely discussed with the workers.
[07:24] Whose output, as well as involvement in the project, increased dramatically.
[07:30] Each completed relay was counted by a tireless tape, which recorded an overall production increase of 30 percent.
[07:35] In this small room for more than five years, observers studied workers producing more in less time than ever before.
[07:46] Industrial history was in the making.
[07:50] Earlier, Hawthorne's George Pennock brought the Harvard Business School into the studies.
[07:54] Associate dean George Lombard.
[08:00] Harvard became connected with the Hawthorne studies soon after Mr. Pennock had heard Elton Mayo give a talk in New York.
[08:06] Mayo was interested at the time in topics of fatigue and monotony, and Mr. Pennock thought that some of the ideas that Mayo expressed might be of some interest in connection with the Hawthorne studies.
[08:20] So we asked Mayo to come out to the Hawthorne plant and then began a long series of associations.
[08:25] Between our two institutions.
[08:29] The Hawthorne Harvard cooperative inquiry continued into the 30s, delving into production areas all over the plant.
[08:39] When the early returns from the relay room began to be understood, the investigators felt the attitudes of other workers ought to be explored.
[08:44] They began industry's first formal employee interviewing program.
[08:48] Some twenty thousand Hawthorne people aired their feelings about their jobs, their supervisors, their working conditions, about anything and everything.
[09:00] In other experiments, investigators found the first clues to the social organization of people at work, an organization that seemed to have as much or even more impact on output than anything management did.
[09:13] Though not all the results were as dramatic as the relay room, in general, output increased wherever these tests were tried.
[09:23] The investigators found industry had never tapped the workers' real worth and.
[09:28] Sent the massive proof back to Harvard for compilation.
[09:36] When the studies were finished, the late Bill Dickson and Fritz Roethlisberger came back to Harvard with the really ton of material of records that had been kept and accumulated during the studies, and they began the long and careful job of writing up these studies and stating the findings in a systematic way.
[09:58] This work resulted in the publication of "Management and the Worker," which has now gone through many printings and has become a book that is well known, not only to college and graduate students, but also to professional workers in personnel, in business, and other kinds of organizations.
[10:21] The point of view which gradually emerged from the studies was to regard a business organization as a social system.
[10:25] Everyone knows that people are important in business, but a way of
[10:31] Thinking which allowed the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of workers to be thought about in relationship to output and productivity and to allow new studies and new actions to be taken had not been available before.
[10:47] This is the real contribution of the Hawthorne studies.
[10:51] [Music]
[11:05] So, companies discovered people and raised a question that persists.
[11:12] 50 years after the studies, has modern business yet struck the balance between the worker and his job?
[11:17] We can contribute something.
[11:18] I mean we're not just machines and we're not just there turning out the paper, you know, and just watching the sheets flow out of a machine.
[11:29] We have ideas how to -- to better the shop, and I
[11:35] I think they found out that working as a group, our shop really contributed something.
[11:42] It seems to me that uh, like I said, the new breed of supervisor likes participative management, and we've been given that chance, and it's worked out so far.
[11:55] We're facing the supervisor and it seems more or less like he's our equal, you know.
[12:04] He's on the same level as we are.
[12:10] I think the supervisor -- he gets involved more.
[12:10] He gives us a chance to do things the way we want to do them if -- as long as we get the job done.
[12:27] Supervisory attitude is altogether different than it was in those days.
[12:33] You know, you can sit down and talk to the supervisor and tell them something about.
[12:38] The job.
[12:39] He'll listen.
[12:40] Years ago, he was -- he knew everything.
[12:49] In a lot of the classes in the universities, the Hawthorne studies often come out, but how much stays with a student when he gets to be a manager?
[13:04] I don't know, but there's certainly a lot more there than we make you sit.