Study reveals surprising management practice that often leads workers to suddenly quit their jobs

Understanding why people quit their jobs is vital for organizations trying to reduce costly turnover. Hiring and training new staff can be expensive, so lowering resignations is important.

Meanwhile, high employee turnover continues to be a major concern for organizations in various industries.

For instance, many well-paid professionals are considering leaving their roles, with 66% of senior product managers and 58% of IT program managers planning to quit, as per TIME.

The healthcare industry is also affected, as 60% of emergency room nurses and 58% of critical care nurses intend to leave despite their extensive training.

Additionally, the education sector faces challenges, with nearly half of new teachers—44%—abandoning the profession within just five years of starting.

Interestingly, new research shows that it’s not the hard tasks themselves that are why people quit their jobs, but rather facing a long streak of difficult tasks in a row.

This suggests that task organization plays a key role. Managers can use “task sequencing” to effectively lower turnover rates by breaking up these hard task streaks.

Organizations often rely on monetary incentives to motivate employees. Still, these rewards are not as effective as many believe and can be costly.

Task sequencing, on the other hand, offers a low-cost solution to boost motivation.

Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that task sequencing can reduce irrational quitting by 22%.

This conclusion is based on five years of data from over 14,000 volunteer crisis counselors randomly assigned to difficult or easier tasks.

The study found that consecutive tough tasks, rather than individual ones, were more likely to cause workers to quit.

Moreover, it has also been found that workers were much more likely to quit after facing a series of hard tasks in a row compared to when the tasks were spaced out.

Employees were 22% more likely to quit when assigned an “easy task, hard task, hard task” sequence, which included a hard streak, rather than a “hard task, easy task, hard task” pattern.

Interestingly, this defied logic, as the workers knew their tasks were randomly assigned. Still, the task sequence influenced their decision to quit.

Longer streaks of hard tasks led to higher quitting rates among workers. For instance, those who faced eight hard tasks in a row were 110% more likely to quit permanently than those who completed the same number of hard tasks spread out over time.

This finding relates to the “peak-end rule,” identified by the late Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues.

They discovered that people often evaluate their past experiences based on two key moments: the “peak,” which is the best or worst part, and the “end,” which is the final moment of the experience.

Researchers built on the peak-end rule by introducing the “streak-end rule.” They found that long stretches of hard tasks create a peak in a worker’s psychological experience, greatly influencing how workers assess their job when deciding whether to quit.

For example, if a worker faces tasks in the order of “easy task, hard task, hard task,” the second and third tasks become more significant because they form a hard streak.

This sequence results in a negative peak, or the worst moment, for the worker. Additionally, the third task is viewed as a negative end moment.

Consequently, the two hard tasks receive more focus in the worker’s mind, while the easy task is often ignored.

This distorted view can lead the worker to perceive their job as much more difficult than it is, raising the likelihood that they will quit by mistake.

Organizations can significantly reduce turnover rates at little to no cost by applying the insights of the streak-end rule.

One effective strategy is implementing a “task re-sequencing” intervention that prevents assigning streaks of hard tasks to any worker.

This can be accomplished by changing the order of tasks or reassigning specific tasks to different workers.

Organizations can lower the risk of losing their valuable employees by making these changes.

Meanwhile, here are some more reasons why people quit their jobs: