Workplace productivity: It’s all in the eyes

Our researchers

Overview

Research from Monash Business School’s Department of Accounting demonstrates how measuring changes in pupil size during work can reveal moment-to-moment effort intensity. This study brings a decades-old technique from psychology into management accounting to study workplace incentives.

Before this study, measuring how hard someone works at any given moment has been challenging in workplace settings. Self-reports can be biased, and performance measures don’t capture real-time fluctuations in effort. Whilst pupillometry has long been used in psychology and neuroscience to gauge cognitive effort, this research pioneers its application in management accounting to understand how financial incentives affect employee effort in real time.

The study shows that pupil dilation can serve as an objective, continuous measure of effort intensity in workplace tasks. Unlike effort duration (how long someone works) or effort direction (what they choose to work on), effort intensity (how hard someone works during a fixed period) has been particularly difficult to measure directly. This research bridges that gap.

In the experiment, conducted at Monash Business Behavioural Lab, participants completed a decoding task under either piece-rate or flat-wage compensation. Those paid per item showed greater pupil dilation, indicating higher effort intensity, particularly in early rounds. This effect weakened over time as participants became more efficient through learning. The finding demonstrates that initial effort investments can yield lasting performance benefits even as moment-to-moment effort decreases.

Takeaways for companies

  • Calibrate incentives using process data, not just outcomes.
    Pupil-based measures reveal when incentives drive effort versus when learning or efficiency gains sustain performance, enabling more precise compensation design.
  • Distinguish ‘looking busy’ from genuine effort.
    Combined with eye-tracking data on where people look, pupillometry can differentiate between time-on-task and actual cognitive investment.
  • Optimise training and task design.
    Sustained high pupil dilation despite practice may signal excessive task complexity; rapid decreases might indicate insufficient challenge or engagement.
  • Consider feasibility and ethics.
    Modern pupillometry equipment is increasingly affordable and portable. However, any biometric monitoring requires transparent communication, voluntary participation, robust data protection, and careful implementation to measure effort without creating surveillance concerns.

Implications for research

  • This work demonstrates that pupillometry can provide direct, real-time measurement of effort intensity in management accounting contexts. This capability was previously impossible with traditional methods. It enables cleaner tests of how various control system elements (incentives, goals, feedback) influence behaviour through the effort mechanism, rather than inferring effort from performance outcomes that may be influenced by other factors.
  • The technique opens new avenues for investigating principal-agent relationships, the effects of performance measurement noise on effort provision, the role of non-monetary incentives, and situations where effort is unobservable but critical to outcomes.

Want to know more?