How Job Tasks Can Contribute to Higher Pay for Frontline Workers

Many working Americans struggle to get by on low pay.  Can jobs be structured to support higher wages, particularly for frontline workers without a college education?

That’s one of the questions explored in a fascinating recent study by scholars Dylan Nelson, Nathan Wilmers, and Letian Zhang. The study, described in both a working paper and accompanying policy brief published by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, used an innovative “data infrastructure” that the authors assembled to explore the impact of the type of tasks workers do on their pay. 

The researchers found that having certain kinds of tasks in a job description allows new employees, including frontline workers, to earn more. Specifically, employees earned more when their jobs included tasks that either involved more autonomy or were more complex. “We find that when employers raise the task complexity and autonomy of jobs, new hires’ starting earnings increase and subsequently grow faster,” Nelson, Wilmers, and Zhang wrote in the Upjohn Institute policy brief about their research.

Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he worked on this study while a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER). Wilmers is the Sarofim Family Career Development Associate Professor and an Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is in the core faculty of the Institute for Work and Employment Research. Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

To analyze the impact of the task composition of jobs on workers’ earnings, Nelson, Wilmers, and Zhang combined information from a nationwide database of online job postings—which often include the key tasks hiring managers envision new hires performing—with detailed data from the U.S. Census Bureau about U.S. workers’ characteristics and their employment and income history. The researchers then conducted extensive surveys using an online platform to ask people to rank common tasks in their occupation by factors that might affect pay: the tasks’ complexity or the degree of autonomy and discretion involved in doing them. 

By drawing on all of these data, Nelson, Wilmers, and Zhang were able to analyze the relationship between workers’ earnings and the level of complexity and autonomy involved in key tasks associated with their jobs. They found that when employers added complex, technical tasks to a job description, about half the increased pay associated with the job was a result of better-educated workers being hired. But when the increased complexity associated with job tasks was related to skills one could learn in the workplace—for example, assigning medical administrative assistants to help coordinate patients’ care—the level of education of the workers who got the job didn’t change much, but those new hires earned more. This was also true when job descriptions included tasks that gave workers more autonomy and discretion.

One interesting finding of the research is that fast-growing organizations that are smaller and newer than the average employer are the most likely to give frontline workers tasks that require more discretion—suggesting that job generation at growing entrepreneurial organizations could be a fruitful mechanism for economic mobility for low-wage workers.

The researchers also found that the increased earnings associated with a new employee being hired to do more complex or autonomous tasks persisted for at least four years, and, in fact, increased some over time. 

Nelson, Wilmers, and Zhang see their work as having significant implications for managers and for public policy. “We show that organizational workflow changes alone, voluntarily implemented by employers, have the scope to increase workers’ pay,” the researchers wrote. They also noted that their findings suggest that managers facing tight labor markets can achieve the higher productivity needed to support higher wages by increasing the skill content of jobs.  And, the researchers suggested, policymakers interested in encouraging on-the-job training can benefit from understanding the role of high-autonomy and complex tasks in boosting workers’ earnings.