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New research shows that overloading workers with too many difficult tasks in a row makes them more likely to quit.
Three out of five respondents to this year’s Convene Annual Salary Survey supervise a meeting staff — an average of four team members vs. two in last year’s survey. Those who manage others should take note of a recent Wharton@Work article, which tackled how leaders can prevent burnout among their staff and avoid quitting by spotlighting the research of Maurice Schweitzer, Ph.D.
Schweitzer, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Executive Education, and his colleagues took a close look at five years of one organization’s data to understand what led their people to quit. Their 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.”
The results of the study, Schweitzer said, “were stunning. If you think about the kinds of 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 as draining the way the harder ones are.” Schweitzer added that the order in which we tackle those tasks “matters a lot.”
Managers, Schweitzer said, “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.” That, he said, is a recipe for burnout.
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.