Human Behavior

Human Behavior.

There was a time when I had to test human behavior in my workplace. A couple years ago I was a manager at a restaurant, during my time there I had a theory that treating my crew members friendly and with less criticism they would make good choices and work harder just because they knew I was fair. Now, where I worked the management had a way of doing things, rule by fear. I thought this was outdated and flawed, so I decided to experiment and see what would happen if I treated my crew better than the other managers. The informal research method I used was to let my crew decide when they wanted to go on break, if they wanted to change where they were working that night, they could ask to switch someone. So basically my informal research method was choice, sure I still had the last say but it gave them some freedom in their work. There are many methods out there and choice is something many have used before, I am not really sure what similarity my research had with others because I couldn’t actually find anything similar in my research. However, I feel that my research went really well, while I worked there my shifts had the best numbers for over four years (the entire time I was working there as management) and at the end of my time there I was actually in charge of training new managers. I think that, if I had to do things differently it would be to more properly define the line between manager and friend, I had many good years there but a lot of the time because I gave my crew choice and was friendly to them it caused some issues. There were a couple of instances where people started to slack off or say something inappropriate, and I’m not sure where or what I could have changed to have not gone down that path,