Mixing it up

The one strategy managers can use to reduce staff turnover

Staff turnover is a major cost for organisations. So, why aren’t more organisations paying more attention to decrease turnover rates?

It’s established now: employees are much more willing to change employers if they’re unsatisfied with working conditions, including flexible hours, working from home options and work–life balance. A recent study by Polly Kang, David Daniels and Maurice Schweitzer—the findings of which are published in this article in the Knowledge at Wharton business journal—introduces one strategy managers can use to reduce staff turnover.

The study found “managers who want to keep employees from quitting should consider reordering their tasks. . . . People are far more likely to quit when given too many difficult assignments in a row, compared with a workflow that is balanced out with easier tasks.” This includes interspersing streaks of challenging assignments with easier assignments to give employees a chance to regroup, refresh and remember the joy to be found in their work. Doing this, the authors found, significantly boosted employee retention.

Importantly, one of the authors (Maurice Schweitzer) is quoted as saying, “When organisations think about efficiency, they think about the workflow and using the physical space as efficiently as possible when, in fact, it’s the experience of the people that’s so important.” Employees are not machines that mindlessly perform tasks continually without rest. Rather, they are humans who need rest, joy and variety to stay motivated and inspired.

Summarising the work of the authors, Schweitzer says we “should recognise that people do need these breaks” and that accommodating this “will sustain us and give us an overall better experience and have more favourable impression of our work.”

The key to higher retention and efficiency is not more work but a more balanced workload.

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Photograph: Anna Shvets, Pexels.