How 'Fair' Work Schedules Shape Trust and Turnover

A lousy work schedule makes employees want to quit. But a lousy work schedule compared to a colleague’s better one drives workers out the door at nearly twice the rate.

In conducting a study of workers’ hours at a large restaurant company, three Harvard Business School researchers unpack the tension between rewarding standout performers with plum shifts versus giving all employees a fair shot at a favorable schedule. They find that employees’ likelihood of leaving depends not only on the quality of their own schedules, but also on how those schedules compare with coworkers’.

The research suggests that managers who reward top performers with better schedules should also consider the retention costs of leaving other employees behind.

“Being worse off than your peers seems to lead to worker dissatisfaction, but being better off doesn’t necessarily have a huge retention benefit,” says Paige Tsai, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, who is the lead author of the July working paper. “It seems that employees prefer fair environments, and fairness might build their trust in management.”

What’s more, creating better schedules on average for a team was associated with improved sales and tips, the results show.

As the labor market cools and hiring remains sluggish, holding onto experienced workers helps employers avoid the recurring costs of recruiting and training replacements. The study suggests that managers in a wide variety of fields can strengthen retention and morale by ensuring employees have fair access not only to favorable working conditions but also to sought-after assignments.

“The findings really resonate with people across a range of professions. In consulting, people talk about who gets the best projects. In universities, faculty talk about who gets certain classes. What’s visible to our peers, what’s visible to our managers, is something that matters a lot to employees,” Tsai says.

Tsai partnered on the paper, “The Effects of Absolute and Relative Schedule Quality on Frontline Retention and Performance,” with two HBS professors: Ryan Buell, the C.D. Spangler Professor of Business Administration, and Chiara Farronato, the Glenn and Mary Jane Creamer Associate Professor of Business Administration.

A good vs. bad schedule makes a difference

The unnamed restaurant company gave the researchers human resources data from nine restaurants in a major city, capturing schedules from 167,000 shifts for 1,189 workers from December 31, 2021 to November 1, 2023.

In the restaurant industry, three-quarters of employees quit in a year or less, costing establishments about $5,700 per worker in lost productivity, hiring, and training expenses. A terrible schedule—like closing the restaurant one night and opening the doors early the next morning—certainly plays a role, shaping workers’ ability to balance school, family, and other commitments, as well as maximize their earnings.

“When we think about why an individual ‘hires’ a company as their employer, we think about how the job fits into the rest of their life,” Tsai explains.

The research team first surveyed workers to define what makes a schedule good or bad. They combined human review and large-language-model analysis of those explanations with statistical modeling techniques to identify features associated with better ratings: Workers said ingredients of a good schedule included working more days per period as well as consistent days each week, whereas a bad schedule had unusually long shifts, more “clopens” that require back-to-back closing and opening shifts, and too much variability in weekly hours.

How managers allocate desirable schedules—and, potentially, assignments and projects in other workplaces—may also signal whose contributions they value.

“Leaders across a broad array of contexts might not have total control over the overall quality of opportunities that they offer, but they do have control over how they allocate those opportunities,” Buell says.

Schedules can improve retention and performance

The research team designed three empirical studies to test the relationships between fairness, turnover, and restaurant performance. For each two-week period, they estimated the probability that an employee would quit depending on how their schedule compared to their peers. They found:

• Relative disadvantage stings. Employees with poor schedules had a predicted two-week exit probability of 5.10% when their colleagues had better schedules—nearly twice the probability as when their colleagues also had poor schedules.

• Misery loves company. Employees with poor schedules had a 2.61% exit probability when their colleagues were in the same boat.

• A better schedule boosts retention. Employees with good schedules had a predicted exit probability of .6% when their colleagues had worse shifts.

• When everyone benefits, fewer walk away. Exit probability was lowest overall—at .15%—when employees and their colleagues all had access to good schedules.

Scheduling fairness was linked with lower turnover: One standard deviation increase in fairness was associated with a 1.83 percentage point reduction in the biweekly exit rate, a 40% relative decrease from the baseline biweekly exit rate of 4.5%.

And performance increased with better schedules as well: A one-standard-deviation increase in the overall quality of average schedules was associated with 5.7% higher sales and 4% higher tips. When schedule quality was distributed more evenly, turnover dropped, and sales and tips remained steady.

“It’s much bigger than we realized,” says Buell of the impact schedule fairness had on departure rates. “It opened our eyes to realizing this matters way more than we thought.”

How to level the playing field and boost morale

Managers often have to make tradeoffs when allocating schedules and assignments, weighing individual performance against the needs of the broader team. Since those decisions can have lasting effects, the researchers offer these four suggestions for creating a sense of fairness among teams to boost morale, retention, and performance.

Find ways to improve conditions for everyone

For example, if certain shifts are coveted, allow all employees to request them—and if necessary, create a rotation for undesirable shifts, spreading them evenly so no one is stuck with the worst shifts most of the time. “Oftentimes, you can improve the experience of one employee without hurting the experience of another,” Buell says. “These can be win-wins; they don’t have to be zero-sum.”

Prioritize a consistent pattern

Schedules workers can count on and plan their lives around are almost universally prized, rather than asking employees last minute to work nights, weekends, or excessively long shifts. “Giving one employee more consistent workdays can help establish a more regular pattern for others, too. Improving one person’s schedule can create opportunities to improve schedules across the team,” says Tsai.

Ask employees about their preferences

Instead of randomly assigning workers hours or projects, seek their input first, and make every effort to accommodate their requests if doing so won’t harm the business. Perhaps it makes sense to allow an employee to leave early to take a class one night a week, for instance, while allowing another employee to shift their schedule to starting later in the morning and ending later at night to get to regular doctors’ appointments.

Protect your investment

Think of each employee as a reservoir of accumulated experience and training that is difficult and expensive to replicate. “I think that we all have experienced what it’s like to work in a really cohesive environment where we can buttress each other’s weaknesses, play off each other’s strengths, and there’s just fewer opportunities for that if people are turning over relatively quickly,” Tsai says. “Employees have fewer opportunities to learn from their peers.”

Illustration created with image from AdobeStock.