Turnover. The dreaded subject no one wants to spend their precious time on. There’s been a lot made of this topic in the past couple years, what with the Great Resignation and all. Even if resignations might be slowing a bit, no one in leadership wants to deal with having to replace valuable lost employees. In a new piece by Maurice Schweitzer, Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions and Professor of Management at Wharton, he shares one intervention management and leadership can take to help reduce turnover rates.
If leadership wants to retain employees, simply reorder their assigned tasks. In the largest field study of it's kind, Schweitzer and his colleagues found that employees are far more likely to quit when given many difficult tasks consecutively. When they are given a more balanced workflow of difficult tasks followed by less challenging tasks, morale remains higher and employees are far more likely to stay. Seeing as there is always difficult work to be done, this can be a bit of a challenge in and of itself, but maintaining a balanced workflow can be one of the most powerful tools in retaining and motivating workers.
This study explains how employees associate their satisfaction with their job with the “Peak-End” rule. Most of us follow this rule for any experience. We tend to remember the “peak”, meaning the best, worst, or most extreme moment, and the “end”, the most recent moment associated with the event. Therefore; if an employee is constantly having to deal with extremes in their workload, they will associate more negative feelings with their job in general. The original paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, connects the behavioral psychology of the findings with practical steps management can take to make sure employees maintain this balance. Give it a quick read and see if the practical tools can help leadership with employee retention at your company.
