E-commerce Warehouse Data Offers Insight Into Worker Behavior

In an e-commerce warehouse, worker performance is influenced by the performance of those around them, despite a system that discourages interaction, according to research from Caitlin Ray, ILR assistant professor in the Human Resource Studies Department. 

“If you’re placed in a group of people who perform on average higher, your performance is going to be higher,” said Ray. “If it’s a lower-performing group, then your performance tends to be lower.”

These findings have implications for grouping workers more efficiently and suggest that workers are not as interchangeable as warehouse designers may have assumed.

In an e-commerce warehouse Ray recently studied, employees were expected to work independently and complete tasks within a tight schedule, ranging from as little as 20 seconds to as much as three minutes, depending on the specific task. According to Ray, warehouses like the one in the study have an annual employee turnover rate of 100% to 150%, and from the employer’s perspective, it is crucial to keep productivity levels constant and minimize disruptions caused by employee departures.

With only a short time allowed per task, employee interaction is considered a time-wasting distraction. 

Ray, first author of “How Newcomers and Incumbents Adapt Their Daily Performance to Others in Jobs Where Social Interaction Is Unnecessary,” studied how workers influence one another under these circumstances. 

The inspiration for the paper began when one of Ray’s co-authors tried working at an e-commerce warehouse owned by a Fortune 500 company. “After about a week and a half, he couldn’t keep up the pace,” Ray said. “Something my colleague struggled with is that the nature of the job is so precise and automated, yet due to time constraints, he’s not supposed to ask people around him for help.”

For the research, Ray was provided with worker data from the warehouse covering 31 months from 2015 to 2017. During that span, the warehouse fulfilled approximately 8,000 orders per day and employed over 1,000 people.

“They were able to provide us with every single second of performance data. That’s a really unique feature of the data,” Ray said. 

It provided an opportunity to study performance when people work in close physical proximity in small shifts, but neither compete for resources nor benefit from a shared outcome. 

The researchers completed four studies to examine the influence of the group on the performance of both “newcomers” (employees in their first 120 hours on the job) and “incumbents” (non-new employees).

The first study found that, overall, an employee’s daily performance is related to the average daily performance of those working nearby. “We thought of it as a baseline,” Ray said. “Are people still going to pay attention to the people around them when they don’t need to work together? In this sample, we found that the answer was yes.”

A “surprise” came with further analysis, which showed that incumbents were even more likely to adjust their performance to conform to the average than newcomers. “We were really convinced that the newcomers were going to be more strongly impacted than the incumbents because the newcomers deal with more uncertainty compared to established employees, but we actually found the inverse of that,” Ray said.

The third and fourth hypotheses looked at whether co-worker “consistency” matters. That is, if nearby workers had variable performance – some high and some low – would that affect performance? The researchers found that newcomers value consistency. Newcomers were more negatively impacted by variable performance around them and less likely to align their performance to the average. For incumbents, however, while performance consistency of other incumbents did matter, the effect was not as strong as it was with newcomers. 

Based on these studies, a recommendation was to group newcomers, when possible, with high-performing incumbents. “In these settings, it is helpful to surround newcomers with consistent high performers to get their performance levels as high as possible as quickly as you can,” Ray said.

Ray hopes to do another study into e-commerce warehouse turnover rates. “Many companies in this industry seem hyper focused on individual outputs instead of what could be done collectively … there’s so much literature on the emergence of workplace culture and climate and the power of identifying and fostering the things that make us want to go to work,” Ray said.

Published in Journal of Applied Psychology on Sept. 1, 2025, co-authors of this research include Mike Ulrich, associate professor at Utah State University; Amrou Awaysheh, associate professor at Indiana University; and Paul Bliese and Anthony Nyberg, both professors at the University of South Carolina.