A German craft bakery chain has 145 stores and more than 1,350 employees. Many of its workers said they disliked being monitored through checklists. The firm then removed two of these checklists in half of its stores, chosen at random. Economists from Cologne and other universities studied the results. Sales in the stores without the checklists rose by 2.7 percent on average. Turnover among trained staff fell by 35 percent. In team surveys, employees named spürbare Wertschätzung, appreciation they could feel, as the reason. The co-author Matthias Heinz summed it up. Wer Mitarbeitende zu stark kontrolliert, schadet dem Unternehmen. Whoever controls employees too much harms the company. The effect was not the same for everyone. Unskilled workers left more often after the checklists were gone.