Worker Performance - Publications - Faculty & Research

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22 Feb 2012
News

Employee Happiness Matters More Than You Think

16 Jan 2019
News

Companies lose out when employees’ caregiving burdens increase

28 Aug 2023
Research & Ideas

How Workplace Wellness Programs Can Give Employees the Energy Boost They Need

While companies may tout their wellness programs as a way of investing in their employees’ well-being, many are overly focused on reducing healthcare costs, so they tend to offer step challenges and gym discounts that workers don’t have... View Details

Keywords: by Hise Gibson

16 Nov 2021
HBS Case

How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves

attendance and behavior, asked some workers to reapply for their jobs, and gave what seemed like unmanageable workloads to others. Some employees returned from vacation to find that a company car, badge, or desk had been stripped from... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

17 Sep 2012
Research & Ideas

Blue Skies, Distractions Arise: How Weather Affects Productivity

Autumn has sprung, and the cold, dreary days of winter are around the corner. But take heart, wistful sun lovers. It turns out that lousy weather is actually good for business operations. A new research paper reports that a decrease in sunny weather is directly related... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

December 2015
Background Note

Incentive Systems

By: Brian J. Hall

This note serves as a supplement to any course on incentive design within organizations. The note focuses on the principal difficulties in designing incentive systems, including the tradeoff between objective and subjective performance metrics, how to design incentive... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Strategy; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Performance Evaluation; Strategy

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16 May 2023
HBS Case

How KKR Got More by Giving Ownership to the Factory Floor: ‘My Kids Are Going to College!’

workers like his father a share of the profits and get them to think like owners. The case studies, written by HBS Professor Dennis Campbell and assistant professor Ethan Rouen, describe the sea change in motivation that happens when... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

Lauren Rice

Lauren is a doctoral student in the Business Economics program. Her research interests include finance, development economics, health economics, and industrial organization. He graduated from Harvard College in 2020, where he studied Economics and... View Details

27 Feb 2023
Research & Ideas

How One Late Employee Can Hurt Your Business: Data from 25 Million Timecards

deviations on the performance of individual stores in a new study. “One employee being late or absent can negatively affect not only store operations, but also their coworkers by making them stay to make up for the lost labor.” Ananth... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Retail

May 2012
Article

Incentive Schemes, Sorting and Behavioral Biases of Employees: Experimental Evidence

By: Ian Larkin and Stephen Leider

We investigate how the convexity of a firm's incentives interacts with worker overconfidence to affect sorting decisions and performance. We demonstrate experimentally that overconfident employees are more likely to sort into a non-linear incentive scheme over a linear... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Performance; Behavior; Prejudice and Bias; Decisions; Employees; Wages

Citation

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22 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Want Hybrid Work to Succeed? Trust, Don’t Track, Employees

workers over the past several months, Neeley says managers should keep three things in mind as they develop long-term plans for hybrid work. 1. Trust in employee autonomy While working from home, employees have enjoyed an unprecedented... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

29 Nov 2021
Research & Ideas

How Bonuses Get Employees to Choose Work Over Family

pay—and that has the potential to lay the groundwork for an overworked, unhappy existence, according to research by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor in Harvard Business School’s Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit. The research shows that View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Kim Raczka

2025
Working Paper

Training Within Firms

By: Brayan Diaz, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo

Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement. This study uses data from three firms–a car manufacturer, a quick-service... View Details

Keywords: Productivity; Absenteeism; Middle Managers; Training; Management Practices and Processes; Performance Productivity; Employees

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October 2013 (Revised November 2021)
Case

Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American (A)

By: Gautam Mukunda, Lisa Mazzanti and Aldo Sesia

In 2007, Cynthia Carroll, the newly-appointed chief executive of mining giant Anglo American, was considering shutting down mines in South Africa for safety reasons, namely worker fatalities. No company had ever done so before. Carroll felt that operating a company... View Details

Keywords: Culture; Leadership; Gender; Safety; Working Conditions; Business Exit or Shutdown; Organizational Culture; Change Management; Mining; Mining Industry; South Africa

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24 Aug 2020
Research & Ideas

How Much Will Remote Work Continue After the Pandemic?

Are remote workers less productive? While past research suggests that many American workers could successfully perform their jobs from outside the office, companies have been... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

06 Jun 2018
Research & Ideas

Cut Salaries or Cut People? The Best Way to Survive a Downturn

eugeniek Companies looking to shed costs in an economic downturn rarely cut compensation—typically, they slash jobs instead. New research confirms the wisdom of that decision. The study concludes that when a company cuts employee pay the best View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

01 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

A Penny for Your Thoughts? For Big-Picture Ideas, the Right Pay Structure Matters

to focus employees on a particular task and base their pay on the workers’ performance need to be aware of the potential tradeoff when it comes to the willingness of workers to develop innovative ideas, she... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

January–February 2022
Article

Algorithm-Augmented Work and Domain Experience: The Countervailing Forces of Ability and Aversion

By: Ryan Allen and Prithwiraj Choudhury

How does a knowledge worker’s level of domain experience affect their algorithm-augmented work performance? We propose and test theoretical predictions that domain experience has countervailing effects on algorithm-augmented performance: on one hand, domain experience... View Details

Keywords: Automation; Domain Experience; Algorithmic Aversion; Experts; Algorithms; Machine Learning; Future Of Work; Employees; Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Performance

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03 Nov 2015
First Look

November 3, 2015

Workers By: Housman, Michael, and Dylan Minor Abstract—While there has been a lot of research on finding and developing top performers in the workplace, less attention has been paid to the question of how to... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

May 2022
Article

The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns

By: Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer and Raffaella Sadun

We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270... View Details

Keywords: Meetings; Email; COVID-19 Pandemic; Communication Technology; Health Pandemics; Time Management

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