Wharton@Work

August 2024 | 

The Science of Retention: New Tactic to Reduce Turnover

New Tactic to Reduce Turnover

“The Great Reshuffle” is how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce characterizes today’s employee turnover. This follows the Great Resignation, when almost 100 million workers quit in 2021 and 2022. Retaining employees poses a significant challenge for firms seeking to boost productivity, morale, and their financial performance.

What works to reduce employee attrition? Finding sound advice is anything but straightforward. Some experts emphasize the importance of competitive compensation and benefits, others point to a positive organizational culture, and still others indicate the importance of creating opportunities for career development. Many managers weighing the contradictory recommendations feel the pressure to do something to reduce the costs associated with hiring and onboarding new employees.

Wharton management professor Maurice Schweitzer’s latest research approached the problem from a different perspective, providing new, actionable insights. He and his colleagues took a close look at five years of one organization’s data to understand why employees quit. Here’s the main takeaway: those who are assigned a series of hard assignments in a row are far more likely to quit than those who were assigned those same hard assignments interspersed with easier ones.

“When we looked at the numbers, the results were stunning,” says Schweitzer. “If you think about the kinds of the tasks that we do, there are some that are hard, which can be exhausting, and some that are easier. Those less-hard tasks don’t involve taking a break at work, but they’re not draining the way the harder ones are. It turns out that the order in which we assign those tasks matters a lot.”

Schweitzer says for workers who have the autonomy to regulate their own work flow, it may come naturally to switch back and forth between easier and harder tasks. But for those who don’t have this autonomy, managers who assign tasks should recognize how assigning a sequence of hard tasks in a row may exhaust an employee, leading to decreased productivity and quitting.

“The naive hypothesis is that sequence doesn't matter,” he explains. “Work is work. And if you do hard-easy-hard versus easy-hard-hard, we just add it all up and it's the same. But we found that it's really not the same. There’s a clearly detectable pattern among the thousands of people in our study.”

Avoid Burnout, Reduce Quitting

The pivotal finding of the new study underscores the importance of more strategic task delegation. “The simplistic view is that employees get a mix of easier and harder tasks, and they average it out. But that's not what happens,” says Schweitzer. “What these data tell us, in stark relief, is that a series of hard tasks really burns people out.”

“This is likely to be a particular problem in some professions where burnout is a serious problem,” he continues. “Managers can derive a lot of benefits by more thoughtfully allocating work. First, it's incumbent upon managers to recognize that sequence matters. Second, managers should work on determining which tasks are relatively harder than others. And third, managers should figure out a way to assign tasks so that they don't give any one employee a streak of really hard tasks in a row.”

Schweitzer also suggests giving the newest employees easier tasks at work, to give them a chance to settle into their position and experience some early wins. “It makes sense, but it’s not what happens,” he says. “Often, you show up for work and you're given whatever task needs to be done. There’s clearly not a lot of thought about the delegation of tasks in many industries. But ideally, we should ease people in with easier tasks.”

He cites the example of a customer service call center, where it's relatively easy to figure out which calls or customers are easier or harder to deal with. Similarly, in a health care setting where hiring and retaining nurses is a serious challenge, “if we're just thoughtlessly assigning them to the next job that comes up, that's efficient from a time-management perspective, but it can result in a relatively new nurse ending up with three long, difficult procedures in a row. We know that that kind of task streak can lead to burnout and quitting.”

“In almost any organization,” says Schweitzer, “it's a lot cheaper to retain somebody who's already onboarded. They have learned a set of skills and we'd like to keep them. What we found is a way to boost retention that isn't about paying people more money. And it's not even about having them do less work. They can still do the difficult jobs — but just not in a row.”