Does a New Voice Channel Reduce Turnover: A Field Experiment on Employee Voice and Exit in U.S. Fulfillment Centers

Kelly will share a working paper co-authored with Alex Kowalski and Hazhir Rahmandad.

Building on the long tradition of research on employee voice and its potential impact on both employee and organizational outcomes, we investigate whether a new voice channel impacts turnover in e-commerce fulfillment centers. A cluster-randomized trial compared hourly workers in worksites randomized to launch the new voice channel (Health and Well-Being Committees, or HaWCs) with those working for the same firm in control sites. This participatory intervention involved a small group of frontline workers and supervisors who solicited concerns and ideas about safety, work processes, and other workplace stressors from the broader workforce and then developed and implemented improvement projects in response. HaWCs were an isolated change, rather than one component of a newly adopted, broader high-performance work system, and they were implemented in non-union worksites, raising questions about their likely impact. Using administrative data on the population of hourly workers in these buildings, an intent-to-treat (ITT) analysis finds significantly reduced risk of turnover in HaWC buildings in the year after randomization. Workers in buildings where HaWCs completed more projects were even less likely to exit, showing the value of voice in yielding visible improvements. HaWCs also reduced job exits over and above both pre-existing and new, alternative channels for providing employee feedback to management, suggesting their value lies not only in information flow but also in their participatory nature.