Why rewarding top staff with better schedules backfires

The fairness problem

A poor schedule makes employees want to quit. But a poor schedule compared to a colleague's better one drives workers out at nearly twice the rate.

The research setup

Three Harvard Business School researchers studied workers' hours at a large restaurant company, examining the tension between rewarding top performers with better shifts and giving all employees fair access.

What the data showed

The researchers analyzed human resources data from nine restaurants in a major city, capturing schedules from one hundred sixty-seven thousand shifts for one thousand one hundred eighty-nine workers from December thirty-first, twenty twenty-one to November…

The cost of turnover

In the restaurant industry, three-quarters of employees quit in a year or less, costing establishments about five thousand seven hundred dollars per worker in lost productivity, hiring, and training expenses.

What makes a good schedule

Workers valued more days per period and consistent weekly schedules. Bad schedules had unusually long shifts, back-to-back closing and opening shifts, and too much variability in weekly hours.

The relative disadvantage effect

Employees with poor schedules had a predicted two-week exit probability of five point one zero percent when colleagues had better schedules, nearly twice the probability when colleagues also had poor schedules.

When everyone benefits

Exit probability was lowest overall at zero point one five percent when employees and colleagues all had access to good schedules. Fairness was linked with a forty percent relative decrease in biweekly exit rates.

Better schedules boost sales

A one-standard-deviation increase in overall schedule quality was associated with five point seven percent higher sales and four percent higher tips, while maintaining steady performance when quality was distributed evenly.

What fairness signals

Paige Tsai, lead author and doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, says employees prefer fair environments. Being worse off than peers leads to dissatisfaction, but being better off does not necessarily retain workers.

“Being worse off than your peers seems to lead to worker dissatisfaction, but being better off doesn't necessarily have a huge retention benefit.”

Four ways to level the field

Managers should improve conditions for everyone, prioritize consistent patterns, ask employees about preferences, and protect their investment by recognizing accumulated experience and training are expensive to replace.

The broader lesson

Ryan Buell, C.D. Spangler Professor of Business Administration, notes the findings resonate across professions. In consulting, people discuss who gets best projects. In universities, faculty discuss who gets certain classes.