Hiding From Bosses Can Increase Employee Productivity
lol. just had to share this one, via Charles Pierce's blog - http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/
People work better when others aren't constantly hovering over them - or they do everything "by the book" when management is around so they don't have to teach management the short cuts the employees figured out... but, honestly, who doesn't like to have some privacy and autonomy in their work lives?
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7343.html
Companies all over the world have striven for transparency in the workplace, literally tearing down walls in an effort to let managers and employees observe each other. Take, for example, one of the 14 key principles of The Toyota Way, Toyota Motor Corp.'s managerial philosophy: "Use visual control so no problems are hidden."
But recent research proves the virtue of letting employees do at least some work unobserved. In a series of studies, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ethan S. Bernstein shows that decreasing the observation of employees can increase their productivity.
What's more, in a curious phenomenon dubbed the Transparency Paradox, he finds that watching your employees less closely at work might yield more transparency at your organization.
Bernstein uncovered the paradox while studying the manufacturing floor at a leading, technologically advanced global contract manufacturer's plant in Southern China, where tens of thousands of workers assembled mobile devices under close supervision. The plant for years had operated myriad identical assembly lines, spaced closely together to facilitate visibility. The idea was that watching the workers would help managers improve operations and replicate innovations on one line across others, thus increasing productivity and driving down production costs.
...The official company practices happened to be less effective than the tribal tricks of the trade—tricks that the employees hid from the higher-ups, thus thwarting the goal of learning by observing. Bernstein says that there was no ill-intent or cheating behind such hiding behavior, but merely a rational calculation about human behavior: Operators were hiding their freshest, most innovative techniques from management so as not to "bear the cost of explaining better ways of doing things to others."
= new reply since forum marked as read
so I am good 
