Zeynep Ton has spent more than 15 years building the evidence that low pay and high turnover are not the price of competitive costs but a drag on them. She has partnered with retail and service leaders including Quest Diagnostics, Mud Bay and Sam's Club as they adopted her Good Jobs model: improving pay and schedules, redesigning work and seeing turnover fall while sales and productivity rose.
Her argument starts with a pattern she documented in stores: "Stores with higher employee turnover, that were understaffed and undertrained, had more problems." Research by her Good Jobs Institute finds that many employers spend the equivalent of 10 to 25 percent of their labor budget just on replacing people who leave. The alternative, laid out in The Good Jobs Strategy and The Case for Good Jobs, is a system rather than a raise. "Part of the Good Jobs Strategy is investment in people: higher pay, more benefits, career paths," she says. "But the secret sauce is positioning your employees for success."
Zeynep TonProfessor of the Practice, MIT Sloan School of Management