harvard turnover case study

Center for American Progress

There Are Significant Business Costs to Replacing Employees

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Workplace policies that improve employee retention can help companies reduce their employee turnover costs.

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This issue brief contains a correction.

A table describing the 31 case studies and their key findings is available in the PDF version of this brief.

Implementing workplace policies that benefit workers and help boost employee retention is not simply a “nice” thing for businesses to do for their employees. Maintaining a stable workforce by reducing employee turnover through better benefits and flexible workplace policies also makes good business sense, as it can result in significant cost savings to employers.

Thirty case studies taken from the 11 most-relevant research papers on the costs of employee turnover demonstrate that it costs businesses about one-fifth of a worker’s salary to replace that worker. For businesses that experience high levels of turnover, this can add up to represent significant costs that can potentially be avoided by implementing workplace flexibility and earned sick days at little or no cost at all.

Indeed, it is costly to replace workers because of the productivity losses when someone leaves a job, the costs of hiring and training a new employee, and the slower productivity until the new employee gets up to speed in their new job. Our analysis reviews 30 case studies in 11 research papers published between 1992 and 2007 that provide estimates of the cost of turnover, finding that businesses spend about one-fifth of an employee’s annual salary to replace that worker. (see Figure 1)

Specifically, the economic studies we examined reveal a number of patterns about the cost of turnover:

• For all positions except executives and physicians—jobs that require very specific skills—across the remaining 27 case studies, the typical (median) cost of turnover was 21 percent of an employee’s annual salary.
• For workers earning less than $50,000 annually—which covers three-quarters of all workers in the United States—the 22 case studies show a typical cost of turnover of 20 percent of salary, the same as across positions earning $75,000 a year or less, which includes 9 in 10 U.S. workers.
• Among positions earning $30,000 or less, which includes more than half of all U.S. workers, the cost of replacing an employee is slightly less than among positions earning less than $75,000 annually. The typical cost of turnover for positions earning less than $30,000 annually is 16 percent of an employee’s annual salary.

Jobs that are very complex and that require higher levels of education and specialized training tend to have even higher turnover costs. In one study, economist Eileen Appelbaum and sociologist Ruth Milkman find that executive positions, which are well-compensated and likely have stringent educational credential requirements, have higher turnover costs than jobs with low educational requirements. Very highly paid jobs and those at the senior or executive levels tend to have disproportionately high turnover costs as a percentage of salary (up to 213 percent), which skews the data upwards.

Because some jobs have very high costs of turnover and others are less significant, there is a wide range of estimates across all types of employment. Above, we reported the “typical” cost of turnover using the median among the case studies. This means that half of the case studies had a cost above what is “typical” and half had a cost below. The estimates of the cost of turnover in the 30 case studies analyzed here range from 5.8 percent up to 213 percent, depending on the job and employee skills. But the estimates are clustered around the “typical” (median) values. Looking only at estimates of the cost of turnover for workers earning, on average, $75,000 per year or less, 17 case studies find a cost of turnover in the range of 10 percent to 30 percent. (see Figure 2)

The cost of turnover is an important economic issue because about one-fifth of workers voluntarily leave their job each year and an additional one-sixth are fired or otherwise let go involuntarily. While workers who were laid off might not be replaced at all, for other kinds of workplace exits it doesn’t matter whether an employee left a firm voluntarily or whether they were fired—the reality is that it will cost the firm to replace that employee. In the long-term, even if a firm saves money by firing an employee who has stolen or has very low productivity, in the short-term the firm must address the costs of replacing that worker with one who will perform the job better than the one fired.

The Great Recession sharply increased the share of workers involuntarily leaving their jobs. At its peak in early 2009, the share of the total labor force subject to what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “layoffs and discharges”—but what those affected might refer to as “getting canned”—was 2 percent, up from 1.2 percent in 2006, before the recession began. As unemployment remained high, the recession and subsequent recovery reduced the number of workers who voluntarily left a job. In 2011, 23.6 million workers—or 17.9 percent of the total workforce—quit their jobs, down from 22.6 percent of the workforce in 2006. Due to the collapse of the housing bubble and the ensuing economic recession, workers employed in construction especially experienced spikes in unemployment and increased turnover rates. (see Figure 3)

Researchers find that high rates of turnover could be lowered through changes in workplace policies. Harvard Business School professor Zeynep Ton recently wrote in Harvard Business Review:

Highly successful retail chains … have demonstrated that … bad jobs are not a cost-driven necessity but a choice. And they have proven that the key to breaking the trade-off is a combination of investment in the workforce and operational practices that benefit employees, customers, and the company … I believe that the model these retailers have created can be applied in other service organizations … [such as] hospitals, restaurants, banks, and hotels.

This brief documents that the cost of employee turnover for businesses is high, regardless of the level of wages being paid to the departing or incoming employees. Companies typically pay about one-fifth of an employee’s salary to replace that employee. While it costs businesses more to replace their very-highest-paid employees, the costs for most employers remains significant and does become less significant for those with low earnings.

Workplace policies that improve employee retention can help companies reduce their turnover costs. Family-friendly policies such as paid family leave and workplace flexibility help retain valuable employees who need help balancing work and family. For example, research has found that access to any form of parental leave makes women more likely to return to work after giving birth. Moreover, by 2050 up to 20 percent of Americans will be older than age 65, and improved leave policies would allow workers to provide the care their elderly parents may need without having to sacrifice their livelihoods.

The analysis presented in figures 1 and 2 is based on a thorough review of academic studies on the costs of employee turnover between 1992 and 2012. We found 11 published papers that provide empirical analysis of the cost of the turnover with detailed information on their methodology. Most of the research focused on a specific occupation within an industry, which meant that the 11 research papers provided 31 separate case studies. We then pooled these case studies to evaluate the typical cost of turnover across firms as a share of an employee’s annual salary.

The research papers examined a variety of turnover costs, but they can be broken down into two main categories—direct and indirect, which vary depending on the specifics of the job. Both direct and indirect costs will vary within and across firms in terms of skills and training needs for a particular job. There will also be differences in the cost to replace an employee based on the industry, the region, and general economic conditions, as it may cost more to recruit employees to a remote location or if the unemployment rate is very low.

In the late 1990s, for example, when the U.S. economy was close to full employment, there was a great deal of media coverage about how employers were scrambling to fill positions. One story from the Associated Press was simply titled “Fewer workers mean more picky applicants” and detailed the creative ways employers would try and attract employees. The article highlighted one employer, an apparel maker, who offered eight paid days of vacation for each friend an employee recruited to the company.

The first type of cost is direct costs. This category includes:

• Separation costs such as exit interviews, severance pay, and higher unemployment taxes
• The cost to temporarily cover an employee’s duties such as overtime for other staff or temporary staffing
• Replacement costs such as advertising, search and agency fees, screening applicants, including physicals or drug testing, interviewing and selecting candidates, background verification, employment testing, hiring bonuses, and applicant travel and relocation costs
• Training costs such as orientation, classroom training, certifications, on-the-job training, uniforms, and informational literature

The second category of turnover costs to businesses is indirect costs. This includes:

• Lost productivity for the departing employee who may spend their last days on the job writing exit memos or with reduced morale
• Lost productivity due to the need to hire temporary employees
• Coping with a vacancy or giving additional work to other employees
• Costs incurred as the new employee learns his or her job, including reduced quality, errors, and waste
• Reduced morale
• Lost clients and lost institutional knowledge

While direct costs may be easy to measure, by their very nature indirect costs may be hidden and difficult to ascertain. Because of this, out of the 11 research papers that we looked at, only 2 included indirect costs.

The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. A full list of supporters is available here . American Progress would like to acknowledge the many generous supporters who make our work possible.

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High Turnover: Should You Care?

Increasing employee mobility—the degree to which workers change companies—appears to be a fact of corporate life in the 21st century. But are such workers less committed to their employers as a result?

The common perception is that workers who hop from job to job are less committed; perhaps even suffer from an inability to commit. However, the reality is that this new generation of "knowledge nomads," while moving frequently, do form attachments and commit to employers when they stop, according to Todd L. Pittinsky (HBS PHDOB '01) and Margaret J. Shih, in Knowledge Nomads: Organizational Commitment and Worker Mobility in Positive Perspective from the February issue of American Behavioral Scientist .

The rise of knowledge nomads creates "profound implications for managers and for researchers," says Pittinsky. For example, employers should spend less time trying to "retain" employees through incentives like salary bumps and more time "re-recruiting" them by offering interesting challenges and learning opportunities. Retention will follow when appropriate.

In this Q&A, Pittinsky discusses the research, which was funded by Harvard Business School. He is an assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Shih is an assistant professor in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan.

Mallory Stark : What did your findings show regarding the relationship between employee mobility and employee commitment?

Todd L. Pittinsky: Our data show that workers who are highly mobile (who move to new companies frequently) can be as committed to companies as workers who stay put in a single company. Employee commitment and employee mobility are wholly separate. In our studies, there was no inverse relationship between employee commitment and employee mobility. It was important for us to demonstrate this empirically because there is a deeply ingrained belief among managers and management researchers that committed workers stay in companies and do not move. We tested the relationship multiple ways, and ran multiple statistical analyses, and found something very different and exciting.

We found that commitment to company can coexist with high mobility. Moving between companies a lot does not prevent workers from committing to companies.

It is very common for folks to say today that workers are committed to their projects or to their own career, and not to companies. Nonsense. Employees can be committed to both themselves and to their companies.

Q: What is a "knowledge nomad"?

A: Knowledge nomad is our name for the most interesting group of workers in our research. Knowledge nomads are highly mobile workers. Like nomadic people, they move frequently from place to place. No one organization is their home or life. But also like nomadic people they build homes. They form commitments when and where they stop. They are motivated to work hard, and commit themselves strongly to the companies in which they sojourn. But these commitments do not prevent the workers from moving again.

This group has straightforward but profound implications for managers and for researchers. A knowledge nomad challenges the common vision of today's worker as a worker who will move from company to company to advance his or her own career, forming little commitment to any of the companies. Simply put, these employees do commit to companies. But they move. And they do commit to companies, but retain their commitments to their own careers.

Q: Are there other ways of measuring employee commitment besides length of time a worker stays in a job?

A: Length of time in a company is the most common way of measuring employee commitment. And it is the least interesting and least helpful approach for managers. Who is really interested in how long someone stays in a company?

Far more important is the quality and quantity of work someone does when in a company. And commitment, when measured as the length of time a worker plans to be in a company, is a lagging rather than a leading indicator. By the time an employee has made up his or her mind to leave a company it is too late to retain him or her.

We focus instead on lead indicators that measure employee commitment. In our work, we measure commitment as the degree of an employee's psychological attachment to a company and the intensity (quality and quantity) of physical and mental effort the employee expends on behalf of the company.

The second important innovation in how we measure commitment is our use of commitment patterns. We measure commitment to company alongside commitment to career, commitment to coworkers and commitment to personal goals. This allows us to see how commitments are compatible or in conflict for employees. And this very quickly identifies the critical opportunities for intervention for managers to elicit commitment.

Q: Employers often look at high turnover as a bad thing—but what are the benefits of a highly mobile workforce for an organization? For example, should an employer with a mobile workforce try to tap into the varied backgrounds and experiences of those workers?

A: Employers do often look at turnover as only a bad thing, and that is a shame. As you note, research has demonstrated that some turnover is healthy, indeed essential to organizational well being.

But even more important is what managers do when they see turnover as a bad thing. To drive it down they often employ the wrong remedies.

We split a cohort of managers of a large business organization, and later a large government agency, in half. Half the managers were asked to identify the steps they would take to retain a valued worker. The other half were asked to identify the steps they would take to elicit commitment from a valued worker. The two groups came back with very different action steps.

The managers who were asked to identify ways to retain workers came back with action steps like "increase salary" and "change his or her title." These are small changes, with little payoff. They may keep an employee in a company for a couple of months, but they will not hold an employee for long, and little productivity will be gained. The managers we asked to identify ways to elicit commitment proposed deeper and more individualized action steps, like "find out what challenges make him or her tick" and "provide opportunities for learning on the job."

The main lesson of this exercise, for business leaders and for HR managers, is to not focus on turnover as a good thing or as a bad thing. Rather, let turnover result from the quality of your workplace. Turnover is a symptom, not a problem. Change your mantra from "attract and retain the best employees" to "attract and re-recruit the best employees." By re-recruiting employees you build their commitment. Retention will follow, when appropriate. Focusing on turnover can be counterproductive, focusing managers on the wrong things. Let the retention cart follow the commitment horse, and not the other way around.

The fact that HR organizations are thinking about retaining folks instead of eliciting their commitment is a sad statement on workplace culture today. The word "retain" makes workers sound like chattel. Who wishes to be retained? Most employees seek to be valued, engaged, etc.

Q: What types of organizational arrangements and management practices work best for mobile workers?

A: By far the best arrangements are aligned commitment patterns, an approach to assessing employee commitment we have developed, whereby employees' commitments to their own personal goals (their careers, their personal activities, etc.) are examined in the context of commitment to company. The goal of a manager and the company is to have an employee's multiple commitments reinforcing each other, and reinforcing commitment to the company.

In our initial research, we identified several mechanisms companies use to elicit commitment to company while strengthening the alignment of these different commitments held by all employees. Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter first sparked the study of commitment mechanisms in a groundbreaking study of commitment in communes. She focused on the mechanisms through which these social systems elicited commitment from their members. Today, eliciting commitment remains the leading challenge for every leader, whether in business or the public sector. We refined the commitment mechanisms approach by examining the organizational arrangements in which commitment to company thrives alongside commitment to career, instead of at the expense of it.

Employee opportunities for formal and informal learning emerged as a very significant organizational arrangement that aligns commitments. Opportunities for learning align employees' commitment to career with their commitment to company. Nurturing of small work groups is a second arrangement which emerged repeatedly. Employees seem to feel more attached to their companies when they feel more attached to their small work groups. We are using the path-breaking work of Harvard psychologist J. Richard Hackman—on the conditions leaders can put in place to support teams in their organizations—to promote alignment of employees' commitments to their small work teams and the larger company.

These are examples of organizational-level features that elicit commitment from mobile workers and align commitments so that workers do not have to choose to be committed to their careers or to their companies, but can instead be committed to both.

In addition to these organizational-level features, there are individual management practices. Deb Casados, senior vice president at Charles Schwab, and I have developed a manager's toolkit around re-recruiting employees. It allows managers to collect the data they need, real-time, directly from employees, on what they need to be engaged and committed, and not simply retained.

Our most interesting finding in the studies, however, is not on the power of any one organizational-level mechanism or single management practice, but instead on how diverse each company's opportunities are to develop its employees' commitment.

Each company has distinct resources to elicit and align employee commitments. And each employee has distinct and individual desires. One size fits one. So instead of focusing on identifying the one or two singular organizational mechanisms, or management practices, we instead focus on developing the technologies for companies to identify their own distinct commitment mechanisms, and for managers to identify the appropriate distinct practices to elicit employee commitment.

Q: What were the biggest surprises that you encountered in your research?

A: The biggest surprise to us has been how powerful it can be to challenge assumptions and look at a seminal management challenge—how to engage and motivate employees anew, with a fresh lens and without assumptions. Rather than focus on how managers can retain workers, we have instead focused on how managers can elicit commitment and engage employees. That small difference in the framing has led to profound differences in how we frame our research questions, and in turn to very significant differences in the contributions we can make to practice.

Q: Where does your research go from here?

A: We are taking this work in three directions:

First, we are looking at company leader effects on employee commitment. We are going back to this same data set and looking at the power of commitment and confidence in a company's leader, and senior leadership team, to predict important employee attitudes and behaviors, including commitment.

Second, with Kennedy School Professor of Public Service David Gergen, I am doing an in-depth study of a particularly fascinating group of knowledge nomads, business people who go on to build careers as public servants. These people switch not only organizations, but sectors. We're studying the transition experiences of leaders in the private sector who go on to be public servants at the national level (senators, governors, etc.) and those who transition from business leadership roles to make important contributions as public servants in local communities.

Mallory Stark is a career information librarian at Baker Library.

Case Study: The Costs and Benefits of a Strong Culture

Hbr.org 2013-11-04.

• Related items

“How long is this list of escapees?” Kumar Chandra asked as he pointed at the slide on the screen. He was the head of operations at Parivar, a midsize Chennai-based IT services company.

Everyone in the room chuckled, except for Indira Pandit, vice president of HR. Nearly 100 employees had given notice in recent weeks.

“We’re losing them faster than your people can bring them in,” she said, turning to Vikram Srinivasan, the head of recruiting. “Our turnover rate is up to 35%.”

(Editor’s Note: This fictionalized case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you’d like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and e-mail address.)

Vikram shook his head. “This isn’t our problem. It’s the Indian labor market. And it may not even be a bad thing. Some studies show that the more frequently employees move around within an industry, the more innovative it becomes.”

Indira gave him a skeptical look.

“This is to be expected, Indira, especially now that we’re rising above the second tier,” he argued.

This time only Kumar laughed, and Indira knew why. Sure, Parivar was growing — in revenue, profitability, and reputation — but it was still much smaller than companies like Infosys, HCL, and other leading global providers of low- to midrange business-process outsourcing services. In the past decade, Parivar’s charismatic CEO Sudhir Gupta had saved the organization from bankruptcy and made it an industry success story — but it was hardly in the first tier.

“I need to present these numbers to Sudhir at the end of the week, and I can’t do that without a theory on what’s happening and a solution to propose. That’s why I called this meeting,” said Indira.

“What about the ‘People Support’ idea that came up in the Future Vision exercise?” Vikram asked. Parivar had just finished its annual innovation process. Employees from all over the company — particularly new and young ones — were encouraged to join senior leaders in brainstorming and design sessions focused on how the firm could reach its goals for the year. This event, a hallmark of Parivar’s inclusive culture, was meant to foster collaboration and an entrepreneurial spirit. One proposal that had garnered attention was the creation of a new function whose sole purpose would be to support Parivar’s employees by hearing their grievances and figuring out solutions.

“I, for one, love the ‘People Support’ idea,” Vikram added. “It emphasizes Sudhir’s philosophy of genuine caring for our people.”

“It sounds genuinely expensive to me,” said Kumar. Indira loved his pragmatism.

“Cost aside, I’m not sure that’s the direction we want to take.” She pointed at the screen. “These people have told us that Sudhir’s ‘love culture’ — our attentiveness to both personal and professional matters —  isn’t so alluring anymore. They don’t necessarily want to feel like part of a family at work.”

“Come on,” Vikram said. “That’s our biggest selling point. Recruits love that they won’t be just a cog in the machine, that our company and its managers — Sudhir included — will listen to them. That everyone at Parivar matters.”

“That expectation may attract them, but it’s not keeping them here, especially when competitors offer a 30% pay raise,” Indira countered. “It’s what we’re hearing in the exit interviews.”

Vikram was clearly not convinced: “We need to go bigger. We should put our money where our mouth is with the People Support function, show that we’re 100% committed to our culture of inclusion. That’s the best way to reverse the trend.”

Big Brotherly Love

Amal, an associate in his twenties, had clearly prepared for his exit interview with Indira. He was checking off items on a handwritten list.

“Everyone says I’ll hate it at Wipro, that it’s too rigid there. But it’s Wipro! How can I refuse?”

“Yes, I’ve heard they have the same high expectations we do, but it’s more process-driven, far less personal. Here you get more attention from the top.”

Amal smirked. “Yes, if you’re one of Sudhir’s clan.”

“What do you mean?” Indira asked.

“Don’t get me wrong. Parivar promised access to senior executives, and I got it. But Sudhir doesn’t swing by the office, put his legs up, and chat with just anyone. There’s an ‘in’ crowd. Only his favorites get that family-like attention. I guess it’s understandable — one man can only do so much. But if I’m not seeing him or other top people, I’m just stuck at a company that wants to be overinvolved in my life.”

“This People Support idea, for instance,” he said, pointing to the last item on his list. He seemed to be on a roll, so Indira just listened. “I heard about it from my friend who was in that Future Vision group. You have to admit it feels a bit like Big Brother. A whole group of managers dedicated to walking around and asking about our problems? We don’t need more people to talk to. We need more money.” He sat back in his chair, satisfied.

“Thank you for being so candid,” Indira said. “This really is helpful, and we wish you the best of luck.”

A few minutes later, Amal’s manager poked his head into Indira’s office. “Did you get an earful?” he asked.

“I sure did,” Indira said, gesturing for him to come in. “I think he’ll be happy at Wipro — it seems more his speed.”

“You should know that Amal is an outlier. Most people on my team are not like him. They love our company culture.”

Thinking about her long list of “escapees,” Indira wondered whether that was really true.

A New Best Practice?

Sudhir’s office, where he regularly held big meetings, was crowded with inviting, comfortable couches. Indira scanned the room as people settled in. It was a typical gathering: most of Parivar’s senior leaders, including Vikram and Kumar, and a handful of younger employees.

“I’ve asked Nisha to tell us more about the People Support idea,” Sudhir announced. “It’s the brainchild of her Future Vision team. Ready, Nisha?”

Nisha, who looked to be fresh out of business school, began her slide presentation, describing how the new function would work. She included a scenario: An employee is worried about his future with the company because he has been given a time-consuming project that will involve working late, compromising his ability to look after a sick mother in the evening. Aware of the People Support function, he seeks out one of its designated “listeners,” as they would be called, and explains his dilemma. The listener helps him negotiate an arrangement with his boss that allows him not to stay late every night. In Nisha’s last slide, all the characters — the employee, the boss, the listener, and the sick mother — are smiling.

Everyone in the audience clapped, and Sudhir congratulated Nisha.  “This is what I love about coming to work every day: Fresh ideas from smart, young people.”

Not surprisingly, Kumar was the first with questions: How much would the function cost? How would it scale up as the company grew? Who would manage it? Nisha attempted to provide answers, but Sudhir interrupted before she got very far. “We must still work some things out, of course, and those all are legitimate concerns. But I think this would be money well spent.”

Kumar wasn’t satisfied. “OK, so we won’t discuss specifics today, but what about our broader plans for growth? Will all this family stuff be appropriate outside India, when we expand to the UK and the U.S.?”

“That’s also an important issue to explore. But people everywhere want their company to care about them and their lives,” Sudhir said, indicating with a glance at Kumar that the interrogation should cease. “Indira, do you have any questions? This obviously falls into your arena.”

Indira shared Kumar’s concerns and more. But she wanted to ask something new. “Nisha, thank you for this thoughtful presentation. I was wondering if you’ve considered how the listeners will be evaluated. How will we know if they’re performing well?”

“Retention numbers,” Nisha said. “The lower our turnover rate, the better the listeners are doing.”

Indira contemplated the complexity of evaluating anyone on the basis of turnover, given the volatility in the labor market. She felt queasy thinking about it and dreaded delivering the most recent attrition numbers to Sudhir.

Vikram piped up to ask whether any other companies in India or elsewhere had tried a similar program or if Parivar would lead the way.

“As far as we know — and Nisha has researched it — no other company has done this before. Sure, HCL has its employee-first culture, but this is about truly understanding and meeting our people’s needs. Nisha and I were talking earlier about how someday this might become a best practice for all of India, perhaps beyond.”

Later, as everyone was filing out, Sudhir pulled Indira aside. “Thank you for going easy on Nisha. We want to encourage young people like her to put forward bold ideas. But of course I want your honest opinion. We’re meeting on Friday, yes? You had something for me?”

Honest Skepticism

Indira took the elevator to the fourth floor. She hoped her colleague and business school friend, Amrita, would be in her office.

“Thank God you’re not busy,” she joked, finding Amrita with her head down at her desk. The two women were always busy, but they had an open-door policy for each other.

Indira explained about the meeting in Sudhir’s office, the People Support function, the exit interview with Amal, and the horrible turnover numbers.

“So I’m skeptical of this People Support idea because I’m not sure we can really nurture Sudhir’s love culture across an organization that’s growing so fast. It’s one thing as a philosophy of how he interacts with people, but building processes and formal management structures around it is a whole different story.”

“That’s a tough message to deliver to someone who has turned the company around, tripled revenue, and quintupled profits with that culture at the center,” Amrita acknowledged. “I’m sure he thinks this is solving the problem of his limited capacity.”

“But can you formalize a culture as distinctive as ours into processes and roles?” Indira wondered honestly. “Will this People Support function even work? And if it does, won’t it alienate more employees like Amal? What if it worsens our turnover problem instead of fixing it? If we want to expand to Europe and the U.S., don’t we need to be less like a cult?”

Amrita laughed. “You know what Sudhir likes to say: ‘Cult is part of culture.’ But it’s not your style to just say what he wants to hear, Indira. If you think People Support is a bad idea, tell him. He’ll take your advice seriously.”

Indira knew she had more power than most HR heads. Sudhir wanted to run a humane company, and that meant giving her a say on big issues.

“I plan to be honest with him,” Indira replied. “But another thing Sudhir always says is, ‘Don’t come to me with a problem; come with a solution.’ If Vikram and Nisha are right, People Support could be just the edge we need against the likes of Wipro and Infosys, a way to retain our people and win new recruits. What if this helps us break into the top tier?”

“Do you really think it will, Indira?”

“I’m not sure, and I don’t have any better ideas right now.”

Question: Should Indira endorse the new People Support function?

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1. saving money by predicting who will quit.

2. Relating engagement with store income

3. turnover at experian.

4. Flight risk at IBM

5. keeping key talent at nielsen, 6. reducing road traffic accidents.

7. Achieving an optimum staffing level

8. A/B Testing Employee Training

9. sick days at e.on, 10. engagement at clarks, 11. engagement at shell, 12. hr driving store performance.

• Customer count
• Customer satisfaction
• Employee retention
• Linked employee outcomes to their real business outcomes
• Prioritize on the factors that had the largest impact on business outcomes
• Show the business impact of improvements of these factors
• Focus front-line managers on the factors that showed the largest impact

• a 16 % increase in customer satisfaction,
• 18,000 more customers a year
• 10% less staff turnover

13. Compensation and benefits at Clarks

14. opening a new office by cisco, 15. unilever: automated listening during a hostile takeover, bonus: hr analytics at a small company, weekly update.

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Quantum Workplace Can Help You See, Sense, and Stop Costly Turnover 

Employee retention is a top 3 priority for 77% of HR leaders and 62% of senior leaders going into 2023. This is no surprise as the Great Resignation persists and another period of economic uncertainty looms.  

But while retention is top of mind , many leaders admit their employee retention strategies aren’t very effective . Most say their organization’s approach is at the intermediate or beginner level.   

Is your retention strategy effective? Take our quiz to find out >>>

If you’re not taking time to strategically address retention and turnover, you’re leaving a lot on the line. The good news is that a lot of unwanted turnover is predictable and preventable.

These employee retention case studies will give you hope. You’ll learn how these Quantum Workplace customers have optimized their employee listening strategies for employee retention. And how they’ve leveraged our employee success platform to uncover insights, build better workplaces, and retain their best talent.  

Briggs Industrial Solutions Digs Deep with Frontline Workers to I mprove Engagement & Retention

Briggs Industrial Solutions began partnering with Quantum Workplace on their engagement survey in 2020, wrapping up their third engagement survey in 2022.   

By taking feedback from the surveys and diving deep into targeted areas of the company via focus groups, Briggs has uncovered solutions and strategies to move the needle on areas that are impacting engagement and retention.   

In 2021, Briggs was struggling to retain their technicians, who make up the majority of the company’s workforce. These technicians spend their days out in the field, traveling to customers and repairing equipment. They are critical to the success of the company. But most were leaving the company before they hit 3-5 years of tenure.     

The leadership team at Briggs knew they needed to take a good look at what might be causing disengagement and turnover. Their engagement survey shed light on specific and actionable challenges to overcome:     

• Technician “intent to stay” dropped 5% 
• Perceptions of fair pay dropped 4% 
• Perceptions of recognition dropped 11% 
• Value of the ESOP dropped 11% 

With the feedback received from engagement surveys, Briggs continued to evaluate benefits, compensation, and team structure across the board. They also worked to understand why techs were not feeling recognized for their contributions.   

Leaders uncovered multiple areas to review. There was frustration around pay gaps between tenured and incoming employees. Work assignments weren’t always aligned with technicians’ strengths and skill level. And there weren’t clear guidelines on increased compensation for new skills and training assistance.     

As a result, Briggs implemented profit sharing in 2022, in addition to ESOP. They created a career path for technicians, providing clarity on what they needed to do to grow, develop, and advance in their career. And finally, they provided more internal classroom training, rather than solely relying on senior technicians.   

The changes the Briggs leadership team made led to impressive results on their next engagement survey:   

• Perceptions of recognition increased 17 points 
• “Senior leaders value people as their most important resource” increased 16 points 
• Perceptions of trust and fairness increased 14 points 
• Perceptions of fair pay increased 14 points  

“Our industry is very competitive. It’s tough to hire skilled technicians,” says Perez, HR Manager at Briggs. “But we’re now hearing that Briggs is becoming the employer of choice in our industry. Our techs are talking and we’re seeing a ton of referrals now.”  

When it comes to acting on survey results, Perez has this advice:   

“Don’t try to boil the ocean,” she says. “You’re going to get a ton of feedback and a lot of things you want to act on–but you can’t do it all at once. You need to focus on what matters most. On what you can give your full attention to.”  

Twin Cities Manufacturing Company Uses Targeted Analysis to Tackle Employee Turnover  

As one of the largest privately held companies in the Midwest, this Twin Cities manufacturer has experienced exponential growth over the last several decades.   

Coinciding with that growth, the company has evolved its employee listening strategy to capture and understand the employee experience. They partner with Quantum Workplace to implement engagement, pulse, and lifecycle surveys .   

• Engagement. The growing manufacturer deploys an employee engagement survey to uncover areas in which the company can move the needle. Leaders pay close attention to what is happening within specific business units and regions.   
• Pulse. The company uses pulse surveys to hear from employees at locations where acquisitions have happened. The goal is to make sure that new employee onboarding is effective, and employees have what they need to succeed.   
• Lifecycle. The company uses exit surveys to get a more holistic view of turnover.  

With data from these surveys, the company can understand macro and micro turnover trends. They can also see how turnover affects different employee demographics and pinpoint reasons for turnover within specific groups. Exit survey analytics have helped the company uncover areas of misalignment and opportunity, including:   

• Creating more clarity on manager/employee workload expectations to help prevent unwanted turnover early in the employee journey 
• Better understanding compensation expectations in a competitive market 

Survey analytics have also helped shed light on why critical roles and skill sets have left the company, and to uncover trends in areas of the business experiencing higher turnover.   

“The labor market is really tight right now, and we get a lot of great intel from the surveys to help us improve the employee experience and understand why people might be leaving,” said the company’s Organization Effectiveness Leader. “In an industry where turnover is pretty high right now, it’s important for us to have this intel in order to stay competitive.”  

Read more about this Twin Cities Manufacturing Company’s success here >>>  

Meritrust Credit Union Use s Surveys to Understand Employee Retention Drivers  

HR leaders at Meritrust Credit Union were focused on retention and turnover in 2022. They wanted to take a deeper dive into the reasons employees leave–and why they stay. Partnering with the People Insights Team at Quantum Workplace, they were able to uncover key information that shed light on just how critical company culture is to their retention strategy.   

When asked to rate “it would take a lot to get me to leave this organization,” Meritrust followed up with a logic-based response based on how employees answered the question.   

• If they responded favorably, they were asked “what makes you stay at this organization?”  
• If they responded unfavorably, they were asked “what would make you leave this organization.”  

Meritrust asked every employee a variation of the question and then turned the responses into a custom survey demographic. What did they find? The primary reasons people stay at Meritrust were:   

• Workplace culture (90%) 
• Career advancement opportunities (89%) 
• Relationship with their manager (84%) 

This proved that culture and career growth are imperative for retention and engagement–something leaders at Meritrust had been trying to improve all along.  

Mutual of Omaha Leverages Pulse Surveys to Un cover Insights and Retain Talent  

A Fortune 500 insurance company, Mutual of Omaha was founded on a simple but powerful principle: to help people in their time of need and protect those they love the most.   

In recent years, the insurance and financial services industries have become increasingly competitive for talent. Mutual of Omaha was having a hard time recruiting for technology roles—and was seeing high turnover within the first two years of employee tenure.   

The company knew that having the right insights would help them understand and troubleshoot turnover effectively—so they turned to Quantum Workplace’s employee engagement platform .     

Mutual of Omaha utilized a broad range of employee surveys to capture feedback at various stages of the employee journey. In addition to leveraging an annual engagement survey, Mutual of Omaha also launches regular pulse surveys to capture critical feedback on important topics.   

• In 2021, they launched a pulse to understand employee perceptions and preferences related to post-pandemic work arrangements. 
• In 2022, they launched a “War for Talent” pulse to get a feel for how equipped the company was (or wasn’t) to attract, engage, and retain top talent.

A strategic employee listening strategy has empowered Mutual of Omaha to gain clarity around what is driving people to stay, what is driving them to leave, and what leaders can do to improve retention and engagement. The company has seen measurable improvements:  

• 94% favorability ratings from new hires after 30 days of employment  
• 93% of associates making progress on a learning and growth plan (a key magnet in the company’s retention strategy)  
• 86% employee retention rate  

Read more about Mutual of Omaha’s success here >>> 

Sammons Financial Group Increases Frequency of Employee Listening to Drive Change  

Sammons Financial Group (SFG) is heavily focused on establishing a “workforce of the future” and best-in-class workplace culture. The company feels both are necessary to retain top talent in a competitive market. To support its retention and talent management efforts, SFG uses employee listening tools from Quantum Workplace.   

Initially, SFG’s survey implementations were infrequent, happening only every 2-3 years. Years later, they had a big question:   

“What are we actually doing to understand employee voice?”   

The company realized employee voices needed to be captured more frequently to achieve a more accurate, timely view. After shortening their engagement survey cadence to 18 months, SFG’s employee engagement efforts started gaining momentum. The company saw an increase in engagement and a stronger organizational commitment to action. The progress led to leadership buying into an annual survey.     

With a regular cadence of employee listening, SFG gains a true year-over-year understanding of employee voices—and can design annual commitments around this timing to better align with opportunities uncovered in the survey data.   

Prior to moving to an annual survey cadence, one of the challenges SFG faced was understanding how to best utilize their data. Now, SFG can equip organizational leaders with the data they need, on a more frequent basis, and understand where to act. They have the potential to activate real, meaningful change when it comes to engagement and retention.  

Read more about Sammons Financial Group’s success here >>>  

Quantum Workplace Can Help You See, Sense, and Stop Costly Turnover  

With the right intel, insights, and a roadmap for change, you can build a culture that draws in and retains your best talent. Quantum Workplace offers employee retention solutions to help keep your top talent engaged and on the path to success—making them more likely to stay.  

Learn How to Keep Your Best Talent by approaching retention with intention in this eBook.

Published December 9, 2022 | Written By Kristin Ryba

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• Stacking consecutive similar neuroendovascular cases is associated with reduced turnover time and procedure time
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9553-8732 Charles Fleming 1 ,
• Christian Terwiesch 2 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1401-4377 John Reavey-Cantwell 1
• 1 Virginia Commonwealth University Health , Richmond , Virginia , USA
• 2 University of Pennsylvania Wharton School , Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , USA
• Correspondence to Dr John Reavey-Cantwell; john.reavey-cantwell{at}vcuhealth.org

Background Across a wide range of tasks it has been shown that workers switching between different activities have ‘switching costs’ due to slower performance and increased errors. Scheduling similar cases consecutively, or ‘stacking cases’, allows an operating room (OR) team to avoid switching costs and might therefore result in increased efficiency.

Objective To investigate whether stacking neuroendovascular cases decreases turnover and procedure time.

Methods A retrospective case series was identified of 4386 endovascular cases performed by vascular neurosurgeons between 2015 and 2023 at an academic center. A ‘stacked case’ was defined as a binary variable, which counted as ‘yes’ when the preceding case was the same procedure. Primary outcomes were turnover time and procedure time.

Results Diagnostic angiograms (n=2575) and aneurysm embolizations (n=517) had a sufficient number of cases for statistical analysis.

Stacked diagnostic angiograms were associated with significantly faster turnover time (7 min, P=1e-12) in a multivariate regression model. Turnover time decreased with additional stacked cases, with a 4 min reduction for a single stacked case, up to 11 min for a fifth stacked angiogram.

For angiograms and aneurysm embolizations, stacked cases were associated with shorter procedure times: 4 min for angiograms (P<0.0001) and 20 min for aneurysm embolizations (P=0.0057).

Conclusion This project demonstrates that stacking similar cases is associated with reduced turnover and procedure time, after controlling for other variables that affect the flow of an OR day. Stacking cases is a zero-cost intervention that offers significant efficiency gains in the OR schedule.

• Angiography

https://doi.org/10.1136/jnis-2024-022218

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Contributors Study design: CF, JR-C, CT. Data collection and statistical analysis: CF, JR-C. Drafting manuscript: CF. Revision and approval of final manuscript: CF, JR-C, CT. JR-C is the guarantor.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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Leadership Lessons from a NASA Tragedy

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson offers a window into NASA’s organizational challenges.

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In early 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere. All seven astronauts on board were killed.

This was not the first NASA mission to end in disaster, and it inspired Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson to write a business case about what went wrong.

Edmondson studies psychological safety and organizational learning. Her most recent book is Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well .

In this episode, she breaks down the organizational challenges within NASA that contributed to the Columbia tragedy, offering a window into the organization’s leadership. Edmondson also shares lessons for all leaders about the dangers of unyielding hierarchy and of failing to listen to dissenting voices.

Key episode topics include: leadership, managing people, organizational culture, operations and supply chain management, NASA, hierarchy, science.

HBR On Leadership curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock the best in those around you. New episodes every week.

• Listen to the original Cold Call episode: The Space Shuttle Columbia’s Final Mission (2016)
• Find more episodes of Cold Call
• Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org .

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Leadership – case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.

In early 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. All seven astronauts on board were killed. This was not the first NASA mission to end in disaster. And it inspired Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson to write a business case about what went wrong.

Edmondson studies psychological safety and organizational learning. Her most recent book is Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well . In this episode, Edmondson breaks down the organizational challenges within NASA that contributed to the Columbia tragedy, offering a window into the organization’s leadership. Edmondson also shares lessons for all leaders about the dangers of unyielding hierarchy and of failing to listen to dissenting voices.

This episode originally aired on Cold Call in September 2016. Here it is.

BRIAN KENNY: The Space Shuttle Columbia launched for the first time on April 12th, 1981: the first flight of the Space Shuttle Program. Over the next 22 years, it completed 27 missions.

On February 1st 2003, as its 28th mission neared an end, the shuttle disintegrated upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.

Today we’ll hear from Professor Amy Edmondson about her case, entitled Columbia’s Final Mission. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call .

SPEAKER 1: So, you’re all sitting there in your classroom.

SPEAKER 2: Professor walks in, and-

SPEAKER 3: And they look up and you know it’s coming.

SPEAKER 4: Oh, the dreaded cold call.

BRIAN KENNY: Professor Edmondson teaches in the MBA and doctoral programs here, as well as the executive education program. Her areas of expertise include leadership, teams, innovation and organizational learning. And perhaps you could add rocket science to that list after having written this case. Amy, welcome.

AMY EDMONDSON: Thank you. Glad to be here.

BRIAN KENNY: So, I thought we would start just by asking you to set up the case. This opens in a pretty dramatic fashion, due to the nature of the subject.

AMY EDMONDSON: It certainly does. My colleague Mike Roberto came to me right after this terrible accident and said, “Let’s write a case on it.”

Now, Mike and I had done several projects together and we both shared an interest in crisis and failure. So, I said, “Yes, let’s do it.”

Of course, we had to then wait for about six months before the official accident report was done by the Columbia Accident Investigation Team. So, we needed those data before we could do our work.

BRIAN KENNY: What inspired you to take on this particular topic?

AMY EDMONDSON: We expected that it would be a very rich story: that the causes of the accident would be multiple, that they would not be simple, that there would be a rich organizational story behind it. And we were right.

And we were particularly interested in the fact that NASA had experienced a prior catastrophic failure in its Shuttle Program back in 1986, with the Challenger launch disaster. And so we were interested in whether this was different or the same.

Clearly we expected; and we were right; that it would not be a purely technical malfunction, that it would be an organizational malfunction. And that’s what we wanted to understand.

BRIAN KENNY: How is this case different from others in terms of how students prepare? I know you have this paper case, there’s a multimedia version of this, and you teach it in both ways.

AMY EDMONDSON: Yes. First we wrote the paper case. We wanted to make sure it stood up to the test of teaching, and it did. We still use the paper case, especially sometimes if we’re teaching abroad, and it’s just easier than the complexity of the multimedia case.

BRIAN KENNY: Right.

AMY EDMONDSON: But the multimedia case, it has all of the same data and more. And its distinctive value is that there are six different perspectives from which it can be read. And each student is assigned to just one of them.

The six perspectives, three of them are relatively senior managers at NASA, and three of them are working engineers. They each have access to their own emails that they had at that time, to the conversations that they were a part of; but of course, not to the conversations that they were not a part of.

So when the students come into the classroom, they each have about 80% of the same data as everyone else, which means about 20% unique data, unique only to their role: which is of course, much more like real life than an ordinary conversation.

So when I teach the case, I remind people of that reality. And I say, “It’s going to be required for you to ask each other questions when you hear something that’s puzzling, that you haven’t read before.”

BRIAN KENNY: Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of the culture at NASA? Because you go back in some historical detail about Apollo missions, and it seemed like there was a different culture at that time. And it changed over time.

AMY EDMONDSON: All organizations, when they’re new, go through a period of great energy and excitement and innovation and openness as they are working to figure out what’s going to work, to figure out their replicable formula for success. Once they get that established, complacency can set in. So let’s call this Phase 2.

And in Phase 2, there’s a growing sense of confidence; “We know what we’re doing.” Less openness to dissenting views, perhaps less humility, less of an innovation mindset, than often that period of usually relative success. But also complacency will often come to an end with a failure.

BRIAN KENNY: So, in the Apollo years, it sounded like they were able to do some rapid problem-solving when they got into issues. You talk about the fire in the capsule, and how they were able to resolve that on the fly. What changed between that time and when the Shuttle Program came into being?

AMY EDMONDSON: Well, I think the one-word answer is “leadership.” I’ve already said things about the culture and greater complacency and greater confidence. It’s leadership’s role to combat that very natural tendency.

It’s leadership’s role to do as Gene Kranz did in the Apollo 13 mission and say, “Failure’s not an option. And I’m absolutely confident that between your engineering training and our collaborative abilities, we’ll solve this problem.”

That spirit was no longer there in the mission leadership at the time of Columbia.

BRIAN KENNY: Is there a difference between the way engineers would approach these kinds of organizational challenges and say, managers that have other kinds of backgrounds?

AMY EDMONDSON: I wish I could say simply the answer is, “Yes.” The reason it’s more complicated than that is that most of these managers at NASA, very senior managers, had engineering backgrounds.

In fact, there’s a very famous line in the Challenger launch disaster where one manager says to another, “Bob, take off your engineer’s hat and put on your management hat.”

The subtext of that comment seems to be, “Realize that we’ve got a very serious contract at stake here, and we don’t want to upset our customer. So please be supportive of what our customer wants.” Clearly not the best advice that was ever given to anybody.

But I think it’s a real syndrome where managers think that their job is different than the problem-solving that engineers take for granted.

BRIAN KENNY: There was a very pronounced hierarchical structure at NASA. And I’m curious about whether or not you feel that the learnings that came out of the Challenger disaster somehow didn’t stick. It didn’t penetrate the organization deeply enough for them to have a different outcome when Columbia happened.

AMY EDMONDSON: I think that’s an accurate statement. I believe one of the things they may have inadvertently learned from Challenger was that launch is dangerous.

And I suspect that every time there was a successful launch in the aftermath of Challenger, engineers throughout the organization, and managers, had a deep sigh of relief: “We survived the launch,” and forgot to realize there’s every bit as big a risk upon re-entry.

So, they learned the technical lessons well. I don’t think the organizational lessons were learned as well until later.

BRIAN KENNY: The incident that happened when the Columbia took off was a piece of foam; I’m going to get the science wrong here; but a piece of foam broke off one part of the ship and damaged another part of the ship.

AMY EDMONDSON: It actually broke off the solid rocket booster: the large booster rocket that the shuttle vehicle is attached to to get into the launch. And then the booster rocket falls away, and the Columbia keeps on going.

So a big piece of insulating foam came off the solid rocket booster, and hit the leading edge of Columbia’s left wing.

BRIAN KENNY: And there was a lot of disagreement among the team as the days unfolded about how significant the damage was, and whether or not it was going to cause any problems.

As you saw the case unfold, as you were doing the research, what became clear to you about what was happening within the team?

AMY EDMONDSON: What we do in the classroom is we try to unpack the causes of the failure. We unpack them at organizational, group, and individual levels of analysis. And it’s multi-causal indeed, as Mike Roberto suspected when we went into it.

BRIAN KENNY: I’m curious about when you do the role-playing version of this versus the paper case. How do students react in that situation? What surprises you about things?

AMY EDMONDSON: It’s wonderful to see the students actually take on the role. Now, many people find themselves appalled to be in one role or another. I mean, they don’t like their character, and that’s fine.

And other times students have more empathy for that character than they would if they were just reading it as an objective document, if they hadn’t been asked to occupy their shoes.

BRIAN KENNY: Because there are clearly bad guys and good guys; there’s a hero sort of character.

AMY EDMONDSON: Not necessarily.

BRIAN KENNY: No?

AMY EDMONDSON: I don’t think so. I think there’s only humans who are up against challenges that are quite ordinary. I don’t mean the technical side of things is ordinary, but the human and organizational side of things is very ordinary.

So they do what most ordinary humans in the absence of really superb leadership would do with the ambiguity they face, and the various pressures that they face in their different roles.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. If we ratchet this down, take it out of that scenario, and say, “It’s not a life or death situation:” but if I’m a manager listening to you describe this case right now, are there lessons that can be applied across other types of industries?

AMY EDMONDSON: Absolutely. To be very literal, anytime you’re going to launch something, meaning a product launch, an initiative launch, a culture change launch, you want to be thinking very carefully about it.

You want to be hearing the quiet voices. You want to be thinking about it from all angles. So that’s one obvious application, is how easily similar dynamics play out in organizations that are quite far removed from the space program.

And even separate from a product launch or a new initiative, every organization faces the kinds of hierarchical and group and cognitive issues that we see here.

I would like to describe it really as an organizational learning dysfunction that is quite common in organizations.

BRIAN KENNY: After you wrote the case, did you face any kind of fallout from NASA? Was there any sort of public reaction to the case?

AMY EDMONDSON: Initially, I don’t think NASA would’ve known about it because we did this with public data. We wrote it. We’re teaching in our wonderful classrooms here at HBS. It’s not exactly front-page news.

But many years into it, maybe six or eight years; I’m not sure exactly; I did get a call from NASA. It came through, I picked up the phone in my office, and essentially this wonderful gentleman said his name and said he was a senior manager at NASA. He said, “We know what you’re doing.”

And I thought, “Uh-oh.”

And he said, “And we think it’s great.”

BRIAN KENNY: Really?

AMY EDMONDSON: Yeah. And-

BRIAN KENNY: So maybe they’re learning something from this too.

AMY EDMONDSON: Absolutely. I think they learned. I think they were learning even without my help. He asked me to come and talk there, and I did. And it was really quite a terrific experience.

BRIAN KENNY: Have they ever come to the class when you’ve discussed it with the class?

AMY EDMONDSON: Once.

BRIAN KENNY: How was that?

AMY EDMONDSON: It was fabulous. It was fabulous. It was very, very humbling and moving. Rodney Rocha came to class and someone else who was not part of the story.

BRIAN KENNY: Great. Amy Edmondson, thank you for joining us today.

AMY EDMONDSON: My pleasure.

HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson in conversation with BRIAN KENNY on Cold Call .

We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues. And follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review.

And when you’re ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world’s top business and management experts, you’ll find it all at HBR.org.

This episode was produced by Anne Saini and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor; music by Coma-Media. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you, our listener. See you next week.

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