How Surveillance Changes Behavior: A Restaurant Workers Case Study

Some anecdotal evidence: I took over a restaurant a few months ago. Half the surveillance cameras don&#x27;t work. I don&#x27;t have video for every incident I know occurs there. But just having the cameras look like they&#x27;re kind of working is enough.<p>I had an employee that stole a bunch of cheese and pastrami (I know, right, what&#x27;s the point of stealing $50 worth of cheese and a block of pastrami?) inside empty pickle buckets he was &quot;taking to the garbage bin&quot; but really took to his car&#x27;s trunk until said cameras were installed. A couple weeks after camera installation and a couple weeks of my eyeing him suspiciously, he quit saying that all the changes were annoying him and that the cameras were the last straw.<p>Currently the employees don&#x27;t even dare to shift the blame for things that go wrong - not to mention I try to cultivate a culture of just being honest with me and giving people a pass for most offenses. They really seem to believe that I&#x27;m watching them when I&#x27;m really just occasionally checking the cameras for activity at night when the restaurant is closed. I think it also helps that I&#x27;ll occasionally use the camera and the footage being recorded when a customer is being an asshole - to support my employees.<p>While I hate the idea of surveillance especially en masse, it seems like certain groups of people are willing to be a lot more honest and hard working when they think someone is watching and when it helps them too.

I think the article in question spins a very positive light on surveillance - in the given context, theft has been occurring and is curtailed by the change in behaviour of staff, regardless of whether or not action is taken based on the surveillance being present.<p>The larger problem with surveillance is that there is no global notion of what is &#x27;right&#x27; and &#x27;wrong&#x27; - theft is assumed wrong to almost everyone, but few readers here will have been at the poverty line, where it might appear a little more ambiguous whether taking a small cut from a very successful business which pays minimum wage is so clearly immoral.<p>These changes in behaviour push us to comply and work &#x27;in-line&#x27; with whatever the watching power signals as being appropriate; and at least in the U.S., that largely appears to be increased revenue margins and employee efficiency - which has a very dull and power-imbalanced end game. There is more to life than work and producing value for someone else.

&gt; In the new study, the tracking software was NCR’s Restaurant Guard product, and NCR provided the data.<p>&gt; Not surprisingly, NCR is delighted by the results.<p>I <i>really</i> hope they had a neutral third party going over the data.

there is a difference when a private entity, whom you patronize (or are employed by) at your own choice, engages in surveillance and when a public entity does so. If you find the private entity abusing its surveillance, you can leave, or in egregious cases, take legal action. When the state does so, you cannot easily leave, and more fundamentally you have a problem: Quis ipsos custodiet custodies?

If they went back and looked at business theory from the 20s and 30s they might have come across a famous phenomenon called the Hawthorne&#x2F;Observer effect <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hawthorne_effect</a><p>Basically, when employees are being observed (which you could read as under surveillance) their productivity improves.<p>Rather than suggest we turn into a panopticon loving society, it speaks to me that restaurant owners should in fact be paying more attention to their staff, and creating a workplace where they feel valued. This should improve productivity, and reduce turnover - but maybe my perspective is skewed because of the differences in being a restaurant waiter&#x2F;ress vs a software dev.<p>In any case, if you want better profitability then why not incentivise staff? If they have a share of profits, then you can be sure they will be trying to maximise profits - including reducing wastage, up-selling and reporting other members of staff not pulling their weight&#x2F;stealing.

As a person who generally prefers to be private wherever possible, I am still divided on a related topic: security cameras. I don&#x27;t want them to be recorded everywhere I go, but then on the other hand, I do realize that the world does have a few bad people and in many cases, they are caught with the help of cameras&#x2F;CCTV footage.<p>I had always wondered if someone can shed some light on this debate from the other side perhaps and this article comes close.<p>I have still not figured out where I stand on the CCTV cameras in public places though.

I don&#x27;t dispute these findings, but the entire spin on this article made me feel like I was reading a PR piece. Who were these researchers funded by? It sounds like it was funded by a company selling a product that benefits from these findings.. Besides referring to specific software products by brand name, there was a conspicuous absent of any downsides from surveillance.

Our current society really tends to mix up dangerously the notions of &quot;trust&quot; and &quot;surveillance&quot;... at all the possible levels.

Yes, you can beat man to submission, true that.

I wonder how surveillance changes creativity?