Managers who want to keep employees from quitting should consider reordering work tasks, according to a new paper co-authored by Wharton management professor Maurice Schweitzer.

In the largest field study of its kind, Schweitzer and his colleagues found that people are far more likely to quit when given too many difficult assignments in a row, compared with a workflow that’s balanced out with easier tasks. Breaking up long streaks of challenging assignments may be one of the simplest ways that managers can reduce employee burnout and boost retention.

“Retaining and motivating people is really hard, and there’s always difficult work to be done,” Schweitzer says. “The insight from this research is that we don’t want to load it all at once. We do better when we break it up. It shouldn’t be the case where we have one horrible day and get it all over with. Lining up a bunch of difficult things in a row is exhausting and demotivating.”

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