Study: Shorter Employment Contracts = Better

Shorter is better.

Why? The slang TL;DR comes to mind.

But it turns out there’s an educational component too — at least according to the results of a new study that examined workplace contracts.

In the study, published in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology and recapped by Insights by Stanford Business School, “the researchers found that workers whose contracts contained more general language spent more time on their tasks, generated more original ideas, and were more likely to cooperate with others. They were also more likely to return for future work with the same employer, underscoring the durable and long-lasting nature of the effect.”

In other words, contracts that contained pages upon pages of specific do’s and don’t for workers, ended up harming the employment relationship.

Instead, researchers found that “the more general contracts increased people’s sense of autonomy over their work.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about the need to write employment contracts in plain English — something that is at the core of a book by Ken Adams whose work has appeared on this blog before.

It turns out that even “minimal changes”, in the words of one of the study’s authors, can have “important consequences.  Especially when it comes to behaviors that are notoriously difficult to include in contracts, such as increasing effort, task persistence, and instilling a stronger sense of autonomy, which leads to higher levels of intrinsic motivation. Reducing the specificity of contractual language can also increase creativity and cooperation.”

From a legal perspective, I’ll blame some lawyers for introducing some language in a contract that can be overkill at times.

(Don’t think lawyers are at least partly to blame for long contracts? Next time you see a “This space is intentionally blank” line in a contract, rest assured that it probably came from a lawyer.)

A few years ago, our practice group went through a standard separation agreement template to remove the “Whereas” clauses and the “Definitions”  — all in an attempt to simplify the agreement. The process took months.  Simplification does not necessarily mean increasing risk. It just takes more time.

Just ask Mark Twain (actually don’t — it’s a misattributed quote.)

Of course, you probably don’t need me to tell you that shorter is better. I just read the abstract and not the entire article.

After all: TL;DR.

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