Research
The Hidden Costs of Flexible Labor Models: How Working Multiple Jobs Affects Employees
As operations increasingly rely upon flexible labor models – such as gig, part-time, and remote work – it has become commonplace for individuals to work multiple jobs. Across three studies, relying on a combination of transaction-level data from 90,548 customers of a nationwide retail bank, primary survey data, and insights from the General Social Survey, we study whether people with multiple jobs live their “off the clock” lives materially differently from equivalently compensated people who rely on a single job. Inclusive of housing spend, we find that people who are more reliant on multiple jobs spend 17.0 percentage points (p.p.) less of their labor income overall, which is driven by a 15.5 p.p. decrease in the share of income spent on necessities and a 1.9 p.p. decrease in the share of income spent on indulgences. They spend meaningfully more on education and transportation, but notably less in all other key spending areas, including categories traditionally associated with enhanced physical wellbeing, such as healthcare and food, and experiential categories often associated with mental wellbeing, such as travel and entertainment. These patterns converge with responses from the General Social Survey, in which equivalently-compensated individuals who rely on multiple jobs report lower general happiness, lower financial satisfaction, lower levels of mental health, and lower job satisfaction than their single-income counterparts, which in turn corresponds to lower willingness to remain in one’s job. These findings underscore a crucial opportunity for operations to design jobs that promote greater sustainability for employees, both on and off the clock.
HBS Working Knowledge: The True Costs of Gig Work
HBS Working Knowledge: What We Learned in Three Charts
The Impact of Scheduling Fairness on Employee Turnover
Employee turnover remains one of the most persistent challenges across industries, with the leisure and hospitality sector experiencing some of the highest quit rates in the United States. This issue is particularly pronounced in restaurants, where the average tenure of a restaurant worker is approximately 110 days and nearly 75% of restaurant employees leave within one year. This high turnover comes at a steep cost — estimated at $5,684 per departing employee in 2006, factoring in recruitment, hiring, training, lost productivity, and operational disruptions. Although prior work has focused on how the overall desirability of a schedule affects workers, the impact of a schedule’s desirability relative to that of coworkers has not been explored. In this research, we examine the extent to which the relative fairness of schedules — a facet of operations management that can be readily observed and compared by employees — influences employee turnover.