April 9, 2023, Pavel Krapivin, Contributor
With quiet quitting on the minds of talent management teams the world over, it might be tempting to assume that there is more concern about employees tuning out rather than quitting. While there is an element of truth to that, employee turnover remains a notable challenge for HR teams to grapple with.
Research from Wharton suggests that how tasks are ordered plays a key role in whether employees will quit or not. The researchers found that when people are given a large number of complex and challenging assignments in a row, they’re more likely to quit than if their workload has a sprinkling of easier assignments. As a result, they believe that their findings demonstrate extremely simple interventions managers can implement to ensure that employees don’t want to quit.
Making Progress
Their work builds on that of Harvard’s Teresa Amabile, who famously stated that our motivation is heavily influenced by whether we’re making progress or not. If much of our work is extremely difficult, it can easily feel like we’re bogged down and not going anywhere, which when coupled with the mental stress associated with working on complex projects means we can easily become demotivated.
The Wharton researchers analyzed around 2 million text conversations between over 14,000 volunteers at a hotline people call when they’re in desperate need of help. The text conversations were randomly assigned to the volunteers so that they received conversations with varying degrees of difficulty, with those involving suicide prevention regarded as the trickiest to manage.
The results show that while the content of each conversation undoubtedly influenced the likelihood that a volunteer would quit, the order of the conversations was even more influential. Indeed, those who dealt with a long sequence of difficult conversations were up to 110% more likely to quit. The simple act of breaking up the conversations so that some easier ones were interspersed with the challenging ones reduced the resignation rate by around 22%.
Transferrable results
While the results were achieved in a very specific context, the researchers are nonetheless confident that they can translate to different professions and industries. This is especially so as few industries aren’t suffering from some form of talent shortage, so reducing employee turnover in a relatively simple way should be of interest to managers everywhere.
When putting their findings into practice, the researchers urge managers to consider a psychological trait known as the “peak-end rule”, which suggests that we often tend to judge an event by how we felt at the end of it. For instance, a bad end to a journey can prompt us to evaluate the entire journey negatively, even if most of it was fine.
The researchers believe that this applies equally to the sequence of tasks we perform at work. They suggest that when we look back at the work we’ve done, we tend to focus primarily on “streaks”, or several similar tasks performed in a row, and also on the most recent task we performed.
This is important, as it underlines that it’s not necessarily the amount of work people do that affects their perception of their job but rather the sequence in which they perform those tasks, with this especially potent if the latest task was challenging.
Breaking the pattern
Managers often compound this problem by relying on the same employees repeatedly. For instance, it can be extremely tempting to assign the most challenging tasks to your best employees on a repeated basis. After all, they’re your best people so must be most likely to yield the best outcomes. While there may be an element of truth to that, the research suggests that such loading of difficult tasks is also more likely to make your best people want to quit.
The key, therefore, is to ensure that you throw in some easier tasks as well as to mix things up so that your best people don’t feel like they’re weighed down by a never-ending stream of challenging work. This will probably result in them being happier, more motivated, and therefore more likely to stick around.