Designing Productive Zones of Privacy

A common theme that integrates my research and course development is how increasingly transparent workplaces can improve productivity and performance by putting up certain boundaries to observation. While the research above empirically and theoretically explores the unintended consequences of having too much transparency at work, the work below suggests what is to be done about those problems. Specifically, it identifies ways in which managers and employees (the observers and the observed) can create zones of privacy to strike a balance between the often-competing needs for transparency and privacy.

These “zones” can be defined by physical boundaries, and so some of my research focuses on office spaces themselves. My work on open environments—The Impact of the “Open” Workspace on Human Collaboration and The Truth About Open Offices—demonstrates how such spaces can counterintuitively undermine the collaboration they are meant to promote and can thus constrain problem solving. Indeed, my research on remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic shows how productive and creative people can be when given sufficient physical privacy.

These “zones” can also be digital. In other research, I focus on how organizations manage access to employee data. For example, a study of police body-worn cameras shows that employee monitoring—which is known to reduce feelings of autonomy and therefore motivation and productivity—can also reduce polarization and therefore improve motivation and productivity when employees (not just managers) get to see and use the data to make decisions at work.

In all of this, the role and work of a manager continues to evolve, thanks in no small part to emerging workplace technologies. As organizations keep redrawing or removing boundaries between employees and information—sometimes doing away with managers’ traditional gatekeeping function—the results do not cease to surprise. For example, a recent study shows that employees who have direct access to their daily performance data—data that were previously available only through their managers—are inclined to “conform, not excel,” although performance outcomes differ depending on the employee’s personality and the quality of the relationship with the manager.