By Gretchen Gavett

How do you get people to do what they’re supposed to do? And does employee monitoring help?

Take health care—specifically, hand-washing. This simple act can prevent deadly hospital infections. And yet, it’s hard for people to remember to do.

Research from Wharton’s Hengchen Dai and Katherine Milkman, along with Kenan-Flagler Business School professors David Hofmann and Bradley Staats, found that as caregivers progressed in their shifts, they were less likely to wash their hands according to standard procedure. This effect was heightened during particularly intense work.

So what would encourage people to wash their hands? The authors analyzed data from a radio-frequency identification (RFTD), system that monitored hygiene compliance across 42 hospitals over three and a half years. Did the RFID system affect employee behavior?

RFID monitoring did, indeed, increase hand-hygiene compliance, particularly when managers prepared their employees for the system’s implementation. And the RFID effect lasted for almost two years before gradually dropping off. However, when organizations abandoned monitoring, compliance fell to below the premonitoring rate. The habit didn’t stick—and things got worse.

Why? To Staats, “the results are consistent with a story of motivational crowding out. In the simplest form, we engage in effortful activities for external outside reasons [e.g., we get paid, someone is watching] and for internal reasons [e.g., we enjoy it or doing it makes us feel competent].” While the external reminder of being watched can result in behavior change, it can also crowd out internal ones.

So, if you’re considering a monitoring program, ask what value monitoring will bring to your most important stakeholders: your employees, your customers or your patients. Also ask what else you can do to motivate your employees. Staats notes that “by far, the most powerful intervention was hospital leadership signaling the importance of the initiative.”

Gretchen Gavett is an associate editor at Harvard Business Review.