Back in the 1920s, a series of experiments to establish how changes in workplace conditions affected productivity took place at the factory of Western Electric, an electrical engineering company, in the Chicago suburb of Hawthorne. Its conclusions became known as the Hawthorne Effect, and it remains one of the most significant and influential studies on workplace behaviour.

We do not know whether, in any way, it helped inform Labour’s proposed wide-ranging reforms of employment laws outlined in the King’s Speech, but what the Hawthorne experiments were able to demonstrate was that an individual’s productivity bore a direct relationship to their working conditions.

This may seem like an obvious point to make, but it was the first time that the industrial world was given cause to consider business efficiency from an employee’s point of view, and shaped what was then a revolutionary hypothesis: that an improvement in the working environment – even simple things like better lighting on the shop floor, and longer breaks – would benefit........

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