Picture a store manager in the first weeks of January, when the year's reviews, new inventory and vendor meetings all land at once. Her shift schedule has two holes, a delivery is stuck at a regional hub, and on a list she keeps for herself is a reminder that a cashier turned thirty last week. Headquarters runs a program for exactly this: every employee with a year of service gets a card and a gift card on their birthday, handed over in person by the store manager. The gift card is small. She means to get to it, and she does, eight days late, with an apology that is mostly true. Then she goes back to the delivery.

She has no way of knowing what that week costs. A study by Michal Hodor and Liat Eldor of Tel Aviv University and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School measured it at a national retail chain with 252 stores and a policy much like the one above.1 The company required store managers to deliver a card and a gift card to employees by hand on their birthdays. The researchers compared people whose gift arrived inside a five day window around the birthday with people whose gift came later in the following month. In the month after the birthday, the late group's sick days rose by more than half relative to the on time group, and full time employees in it worked a little over two fewer hours that month, about 1.5 percent.1 The effect lasted about a month. By the second month after the birthday both measures were back in line with the on time group, and late delivery did not raise turnover.1 The authors put the yearly cost across the chain near $129,600, a figure that rests on assumptions they spell out.1 The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2025 and also issued as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.2

The gift was never the point

A first guess is that the money mattered, and the data argue against it. Employees with less time on the job, who receive smaller gifts, showed the larger rise in sick days, and the effect for employees in managerial roles was more than double the average.1 The authors read those patterns as evidence against a purely financial explanation, and they attribute the response mainly to emotion.1 The authors read the response as employees feeling disregarded, and the survey below points the same way.

Nobody meant it

Managers and HR professionals the researchers spoke with said late delivery was accidental and usually followed operational load, and the authors report no indication that managers meant to show disregard.1 In a separate survey, 200 retail workers were asked to imagine a manager missing their birthday gift, and about three in four said they would feel hurt or offended. They added that they would probably put the lapse down to forgetfulness or other priorities, and that this did not make it sting less.1 The employee can guess at the workload behind the date, and the guess does not help. Whatever the reason, the date itself is the message.

A scheduled gesture turns every lapse into a message, and the sender is usually the last person to learn what it said.

The clock headquarters wound

My read is that the program did two things at once. It gave employees a recognition they valued, and it handed every store manager an obligation with a due date the employee could see. Before the policy existed, no birthday card could have been late. Once it existed, lateness became possible, and it showed up in front of the person with the most reason to interpret it.

Every large company has versions of this. Review dates, promotion decisions, the answer to a concern someone raised, the one on one that was supposed to happen every other week. Each is a gesture on a schedule, set centrally, carried out by a manager with a full week. When one runs late, the manager sees a scheduling problem and the employee sees a verdict. I wrote earlier about an experiment in which people playing managers held back good news nearly as often as bad, and there the silence carried a message nobody had meant to send. A late card does the same thing.

What the study cannot say

This is one chain, measured in monthly totals, and the authors say they did not test whether eroded trust is the channel.1 A retail workforce also differs from a floor of directors and vice presidents, although the employees in managerial roles reacted more strongly than the rest, which suggests rank offers no protection. I would not copy the dollar figure into a budget. I would take from it that the cost of a missed routine can be measured at all, and I suspect few companies try.

The authors recommend that organizations monitor and reduce small incidents of mistreatment and look at manager workload at the organizational level.1 Applied to a leadership team, that starts with a list most teams have never written. Which promises do your managers make on a schedule, and for how many of them could you say what share arrived on time last quarter?