Show Them the Path: How Making Performance Trajectories Visible Reduces Early Turnover

Many firms lose new employees just as those workers are beginning to learn the job. That early turnover is costly. Firms lose recruiting and training investments, teams lose stability, and workers leave before they have had a fair chance to improve. Managers often try to solve this problem with better pay, tighter incentives, or more supervision. Our study points to another lever that is easy to miss: the kind of performance information employees see inside the firm.

That missing context can matter a great deal. If new workers believe they are falling far short of where they “should” be, they may become discouraged and stressed. They may start to think they are not a good fit for the job, even when their early struggles are normal. In that sense, the problem is not social comparison alone. The problem is social comparison without the right information. When workers see only polished outcomes and not the learning curve behind them, they may leave too soon.

We study this issue in a 28-week randomized controlled trial at a large multinational spa chain in China, involving more than 7,000 workers across 160 stores. The setting is useful because performance is highly visible and turnover among new workers is high. In the main treatment, workers received twice-weekly messages showing the performance trajectory of an anonymous high-performing senior coworker in their region. These messages reported how that senior worker had performed in month 1, month 3, month 6, month 12, and the most recent month. The intervention did not change compensation, bonuses, or formal management practices. It simply made the path to high performance more visible.

The results show that this simple intervention had meaningful effects. Among new workers, attrition fell by about 11 to 12 percent. The effect was concentrated among new workers rather than senior workers, which is what we would expect if the intervention worked by helping employees who still lacked a clear understanding of the return to experience. At the store level, the average revenue effect was modest overall, but in stores with above-median shares of new workers, revenue increased by about 15 percent. These findings suggest that making performance trajectories visible can help firms retain employees and improve outcomes where early-career learning is especially important.

Why did the intervention work? The evidence points to stress and mental health as central channels. Workers who received trajectory information became less likely to believe that high-performing senior coworkers had performed extremely well at the beginning of their careers. In other words, they revised downward their beliefs about how far ahead those senior workers had been early on. This belief revision reduced stress and improved mental health. Once workers could see that today’s stars often started from much lower levels and improved over time, the gap between themselves and senior coworkers became less discouraging.

A second treatment sharpens this conclusion. In another group of stores, workers received information about the current performance of a similar-tenure peer. That treatment had little detectable effect on attrition or store performance. This comparison is important because it shows that the benefits do not come from simply giving workers more data. What mattered was a specific type of information: evidence that strong performance is built over time. In this setting, workers were especially responsive to information that clarified how strong performance develops over time, rather than to information that simply updated them on where they stand today.

Ultimately, the lesson for managers is simple: do not just show where top performers are—show how they got there. Making the learning curve visible helps employees see early struggles as normal, not discouraging, which improves retention, well-being, and performance. When firms illuminate the path to success, they give employees a reason to stay on it.