Retail stores, restaurants, and fulfillment centers who squeeze everything they can out of frontline workers and offer as little in return as possible struggle with constant worker turnover, low productivity, and poor worker morale. It’s a vicious circle. 

But companies can make different, better choices, says Zeynep Ton, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Companies that implement a “good jobs strategy” have seen large drops in employee turnover and higher worker productivity, and jumps in customer satisfaction and sales.

The Good Jobs Institute, which she helped create in 2017, has become a lab that allows the team to apply her academic research in real life to improve the lives of low-wage workers in a way that helps companies.