It’s not a new word, of course, but it was made golden as the title of Angela Duckworth’s 2016 bestseller. I bought the book early and have resurrected it many times since, tossing it into my travel bag for business trips. Duckworth, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, opens with a story about her father – far from flattering – who repeatedly told young Angela that she was “no genius.” Years later, as he neared the end of his life, she replied, “In the long run, Dad, grit may matter more than talent.”

GRIT Beats Talent

Duckworth defines grit as the power of passion and perseverance. Take her “How Gritty Are You?” assessment on page 55 and you may find it humbling. Her opening story about West Point’s rigorous admissions standards and startling drop-out rate is even more revealing. It’s where she demonstrated to West Point leadership that the single best predictor of cadet success was not talent, test scores, or intelligence – it was GRIT. The willingness to push, persist, and stay the course.

——

Further Reading: Young Workers, “Grit”, and New-Hire Turnover

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Grit, Generations, and the Workforce Crisis Ahead

In my new book, Targeting Turnover, I explore how GRIT shows up differently across generations – especially as 30 million baby boomers, a cohort known for their grit, exit the workforce. Some of the facts include:

• Gallup’s reporting that employee engagement has reached an 11-year low, and the drop has been particularly acute among remote, hybrid and younger workers.^[i]
• That younger workers are more likely to ghost job interviews and first days or work.
• Terms like “quiet quitting” and “work your wage” are new to our daily lexicon.
• That fewer young workers want the additional responsibilities that come with promotions^[ii]
• The American Psychiatric Association reporting that over half of young professional workers said they needed mental health help in the past year.^[iii]
• That record numbers of young adults are living with their parents^[iv].
• And the pandemic’s impact on school children has been devastating as test scores are substantially down^[v] and absenteeism has nearly doubled.^[vi]

And perhaps most consequential: scientists link America’s sharply declining birthrate to the rise of smartphones beginning in 2011. As especially young people turned inward – toward apps, content, and digital connection – both romantic relationships and marriages declined, and with them the number of children being born.

—–

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Just Got Worse: Immigration, Retention & The Future of Work

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The Bottom Line of Young Worker Wanderlust

Baby boomers are taking with them their “just a few jobs for life” mindset – and history makes clear that younger generations have always stayed with employers for far shorter periods of time. This reality predicts continued pressure on retention for years to come.^[vii]

Average Length of Employment by Generation

Source: Permission to reproduce. Career Builder published data.

Our Targeting Turnover weekly newsletter and same-named book share a deliberately focused intention: to help you improve employee retention and, by extension, your organization’s bottom line. All the data above leads to one undeniable conclusion:

It is far more cost-effective to retain the good workers you already have than to lose them and start again.

Why GRIT May Matter More Than Talent in 2026

To dive deeper into how GRIT, trust, generational shifts, and manager accountability intersect to shape today’s retention crisis, explore Targeting Turnover: Make Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It is a research-backed, action-ready guide for leaders who want better retention, stronger teams, and measurable results.

Get your copy of Targeting Turnover and equip your managers with the tools to win the workforce crisis. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

[i] Jim Harter, “US Engagement Hits 11-Year Low,”, Gallup, April 10, 2024 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/643286/engagement-hits-11-year-low.aspx#:~:text=In%20the%20latest%20reading%2C%20from,than%202020’s%20high%20of%2036%25.

[ii] Tim Paradis, “Gen Zers Are Saying ‘No Thanks’ to Promotions For Reasons That Go Beyond Money,” Business Insider, November 8, 2023: https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-rejects-promotions-management-roles-traditional-corporate-ladder-2023-11

[iii] Jean M. Twenge, “Have Smart Phones Destroyed A Generation, The Atlantic, September 2017; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

[iv] Jean Sahadi, “Many parents say they are still financially subsidizing their adult children,” CNN Business, January 25, 2024; https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/success/parenting-adult-children-living-home/index.html

[v] Tom Swiderski and Sarah Crittenden Fuller, “Student GPA and test score gaps are growing – and could be slowing pandemic recovery,” Brookings, November 6, 2023; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/student-gpa-and-test-score-gaps-are-growing-and-could-be-slowing-pandemic-recovery/#:~:text=At%20every%20letter%20grade%2C%20post,peers%20who%20earned%20an%20A.

[vi] Alec MacGillis, ”Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis,” ProPublica, January 8, 2024;

[vii] “Millennials or Gen Z: who’s doing the most job-hopping,” Career Builder blog for job-seekers; https://www.careerbuilder.com/advice/blog/how-long-should-you-stay-in-a-job

The post The GRIT Gap: How Generational Shifts Are Reshaping Employee Retention appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

What’s most important about Bill’s comment is that he makes the same shift that Targeting Turnover demands:
Executives and managers must own full responsibility for retention and engagement.
HR will always play an important role – but ownership has to sit with those who directly lead people every day.

The Real Driver of Retention and Engagement: Trust in the Boss

That belief is built on rock-solid research that says the top reason employees stay or leave, and engage or disengage, is how much they trust their immediate, first-line supervisor.

Study after study confirms this link. Leadership quality is the single strongest predictor of whether people feel valued, aligned, and motivated – or disconnected and ready to walk.

Gallup’s data brings this home in unambiguous fashion:

“Of all the codes Gallup has been asked to crack dating back 80 years to our founder George Gallup, the single most profound, distinct, and clarifying finding – EVER – is probably this one:
70 percent of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.”

That means no initiative, benefit, or cultural campaign can outweigh the impact of the leader employees experience every day.

——

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Solution: 4 Ways to Turn Engagement into Retention

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Why Engagement Hasn’t Improved in 25 Years

Gallup has reported for decades that employee engagement has barely moved – hovering near one-third of U.S. employees engaged since the late 1990s.
Their reasons?

1. Lack of job clarity
2. Unskilled managers
3. Survey burnout

All true, but there’s a deeper reason:
First-line leaders are almost never held accountable for improving engagement or retention.

Instead, HR teams are asked to “fix” engagement through programs and perks – employee-appreciation weeks, CEO videos, pet insurance, onboarding improvements.
But employees don’t stay longer or work harder because of those interventions. They stay, and they give more, when their direct manager builds trust, sets clear expectations, develops them, and holds everyone to standards that feel fair.

The Accountability Gap

This is where Targeting Turnover takes Gallup’s data and applies it to daily management.
If 70 percent of engagement depends on the manager, then measurement and accountability must start there.
The book presents a research-based system for doing exactly that: holding first-line leaders responsible for the results of their teams, supported by HR but not replaced by HR.

It’s a practical shift from “program ownership” to leadership accountability, and the payoff is measurable – clients routinely see turnover reductions of 40 to 60 percent when accountability systems are implemented.

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Further Reading: Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability

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The Bigger Picture: The Workforce Is Shrinking

This matters now more than ever because our available workforce is shrinking fast.
As Targeting Turnover details in Chapter 1, 30 million Baby Boomers are retiring while birth rates continue to fall.
Every employee who quits isn’t just a vacancy – it’s a labor-market loss that may never be refilled.
The countries and companies that retain talent will win. Those that don’t will fall behind economically.

Fresh Thinking That’s Decades Overdue

I’m grateful to Forbes and to Bill Conerly for recognizing the urgency of this message.
Our workforce crisis will not be solved by perks or slogans – it will be solved when leaders at every level are held accountable for the experience they create for their people.

Read Bill Conerly’s full Forbes review here:
Maximize Productivity: Why Employee Retention Is Game-Changing

Connect engagement, retention, and accountability in your organization.
Read Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It connects the dots from workforce math to line-leader accountability, with the how-to for embedding Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

The post Forbes’ Targeting Turnover Review: “Important Information for Both Senior Executives and Line Managers” appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Business is essentially about money, and chief financial officers, or CFOs, are the money people. They count it, they record it, they lead the charge to set budgetary goals for it, and most importantly they are the voice that CEOs hear the loudest.

Why are CFOs Missing When it Comes to Turnover Reporting?

So CFOs turn their screens on each morning with one objective which is to find the coins in the couch. How can we squeeze out another cost reduction for another gain in profits? They then follow the training they received in business school so they all essentially track their business blueprints the same way.

In my new book, Targeting Turnover, I report on the complete absence of CFOs participating in turnover reporting in this way:

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are standards that public companies in the United States must follow when reporting their financial information. Googling “GAAP and employee turnover” yields a few studies on the cost of losing a CEO or CFO, but nothing on the impact of total employee turnover on other key business metrics. It’s as though turnover doesn’t really exist in our organizations, that there is no presence for it on accounting’s screens. Yet Gallup estimates the cost of voluntary turnover to American businesses is a staggering one trillion dollars…every year.^[i]

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Further reading: When Non-HR Executives Ask About Turnover (Again)

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Full Participation Ensures Agreement on Cost of Losing One Employee

Our first step with new clients is to apply our proprietary turnover algorithm to identify dollar costs for turnover for important jobs…and we require finance to participate. The resulting number will never be 100% accurate because there are too many variables, too many moving parts…but we will ultimately agree to a number that represents the cost of losing one employee in a particular job. Here are a few examples:

• Nurse: $42,131
• Truck loader/unloader: $4,955
• Call center representative: $29,447
• Physician: $225,808
• Truck driver: $21,221
• Software engineer: $131,290
• Forklift driver: $10,742
• Manufacturing entry-level: $5,518

These costs are based in part on company-specific data including revenue-per-employee, the days these jobs remain open, and the ramp-up time for each new hire, so these companies’ costs that as indicated above might not the be same as for your company.

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Further reading: Turnover’s Biggest Price Tag Isn’t Recruiting – It’s Lost Productivity

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There are Many Reasons to Calculate Your Cost of Turnover

This is just one of the reasons why you should calculate your own cost of turnover, and another reason is to include your executives so they actually act on the results. An aerospace company’s CFO’s reaction was like no other. He reluctantly joined in to participate in the calculation and ultimately agreed to the cost for losing an engineer to be $121,500. He called me the next morning to say he couldn’t sleep, went to work very early, and with some extrapolation discovered that his company’s turnover cost was their second-highest cost…placing that cost ahead of the properties and materials required for his company to build rockets.

My book also details how to determine turnover’s cost for all jobs, such that your company can develop reporting month-to-month for not only employee retention’s performance against goals but also against a pre-determined standard to reduce the full costs associated with employee turnover.

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Check out our free Turnover Cost Calculator

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The Cost of Turnover Playbook for CFOs

If you need a playbook for costing your turnover, see my new book Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It connects the dots from workforce math to line-leader accountability, with the how-to for embedding Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow.

Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

[i] Shane McFeely and Ben Wigert, “This Fixable Problem Costs US Businesses $1 Trillion,” Gallup Press, March 13, 2019; https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx

The post Imagine If CFOs Measured the Cost of Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The fix: Stay Interviews, embedded in Finnegan’s Arrow with goals, forecasts, and consequences. It works – even in today’s workforce crisis.

The Survey Gauntlet: Why “More Data” Isn’t Moving the Needle

Organizations pour time and money into surveys, yet engagement barely budges. Why?

7 persistent myths, condensed:

1. “We’ll learn what employees think.” You learn what the average employee thinks.
2. “We’ll focus on top performers.” Their voices are blended into the average.
3. “Benchmarks prove we’re fine.” Benchmarks = averages; averages = mediocre.
4. “Most are highly engaged.” Consistently, only about a third truly are.
5. “Action plans happen.” Six months later, who’s checking?
6. “Managers feel the heat.” Is there real accountability? Yes or no.
7. “HR owns the improvement.” HR has responsibility without authority.

Exit surveys don’t solve it either. “Better opportunity” is a vague summary, not a solution.

What Changed – and Why It Matters Now

The workforce math has turned against employers: fewer available workers, higher churn risk, and C-suite scrutiny on ROI. In short: the workforce crisis is real. Solving retention is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s the growth lever.

——

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Just Got Worse: Immigration, Retention & The Future of Work

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The Four Missing Pieces

1) Managers Own the Talent

Engagement and retention live or die with the direct supervisor. Mountains of research and lived experience point to the same truth: people join companies and quit managers. So managers must be accountable – explicitly – for engagement and retention outcomes, not just ops metrics.

What this changes:

• Managers hold 1:1s separate from performance talks to learn what each person needs to stay and thrive.
• Leaders above them are accountable for aggregate talent health down the chart.

2) Trust Is the Operating System

Praise without trust still feels like manipulation. Trust is built by consistency, follow-through, and fairness – and it’s strongly correlated with business outcomes. Companies where employees trust their managers outperform; this pattern is durable across market cycles.

What this changes:

• Teach managers to ask, listen, act, and report back.
• Make trust a measured behavior, not a poster.

3) Dollars Make Leaders Care

Executives move when dollars move. Convert engagement and turnover to financial impact – job by job. When leaders see the cost, they stop asking for benchmarks and start asking for plans.

Sample turnover costs our clients have modeled:

• Software Engineer: $131,000
• Physician: $225,808
• Call Center Rep: $29,447

What this changes:

• Finance co-owns the model.
• Targets are set in dollars, not just percentages.

4) Real Accountability

Treat engagement and retention like sales: goals, reports, reviews, coaching, and consequences. If no one loses or gains anything based on talent outcomes, nothing will change.

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Further Reading: Why Stay Interviews Outlast Every Engagement Trend

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The Solution That Actually Works: Stay Interviews

Definition: Structured 1:1s between leaders and their newly hired and continuing employees to improve engagement and retention – proactively.

Why they work now:

• Manager-led, not HR-pushed.
• Individualized solutions beat one-size-fits-all programs.
• Issues surface before they become resignations.
• Aggregated insights beat survey generalities and guide team-level fixes.
• They teach trust – or reveal who can’t build it.

Cadence that sticks:

• New hires: Twice in first 6 months (e.g., days 30 and 120).
• All others: At least annually, plus at trigger points (role change, new manager, major project).
• Each 1:1 yields a short Stay Plan and a retention forecast (How long is this employee likely to stay? What would extend that?).

Put It in a System: Finnegan’s Arrow

1. Dollars  –  Convert engagement and turnover to real financials.
2. Goals  –  Set improvement targets org-wide, by unit, and per leader.
3. Stay Interviews  –  The primary solution to hit the goals.
4. Forecasts  –  Managers predict stay risk and act early.
5. Accountability  –  Review results like you review sales. Reward wins, address misses.

Proof It Works (Recent Outcomes)

• Major health system: 58% turnover reduction; $6.9M savings.
• Food processor: 49% reduction; $2.3M savings.
• Waste collection (one location): 30% reduction; $240K savings, then scaled via train-the-trainer.

These are not perks-and-pizza wins. They’re manager accountability + Stay Interviews + Finnegan’s Arrow.

Implementation Checklist (Use This)

• Build/validate a turnover cost model with Finance.
• Set dollar-based goals for retention and target improvements for engagement.
• Train managers to run Stay Interviews (ask, probe, commit, follow up).
• Require written Stay Plans per employee and a quarterly forecast per team.
• Review results in business cadence: monthly/quarterly talent reviews with consequences.

Here’s Your Call to Action

• Leaders: Pilot Stay Interviews in one division for 90 days; track saves, savings, and forecast accuracy.
• HR/TA/Finance: Co-own the dollars, instrumentation, and cadence.
• Get help: Reply to schedule a working session on turnover cost modeling and a 30-day launch plan for Stay Interviews.

Where My New Book Fits

If you need a playbook for making managers accountable – not just aware – see my new book Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It connects the dots from workforce math to line-leader accountability, with the how-to for embedding Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow.

Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

The post The Workforce Crisis Solution: 4 Ways to Turn Engagement into Retention appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

This book is very different from the rest. I waited throughout the pandemic, wondering what is the single greatest challenge we are facing that demands that we work harder and more importantly much, much smarter to retain our best workers. And over time it became clear that the most important societal change of these times was entirely disconnected from the pandemic.

The Metrics That Matter Most

I realized then that many economists were talking about the workforce-devastating combination of our huge baby boomer retirements plus our ever-decreasing birthrate. Yet I’d never seen real numbers on what this meant for the actual number of workers who are available to us, present and future. Many calls and emails with the US Census Bureau brought me the answer. Here it is in one chart:

To summarize this chart in one sentence…

The US will add about one-fifth of the total number of working-age Americans going forward compared to our past.

And that starts in this year, 2025. Then the ongoing, continual picture gets more scary. Reading Census Bureau press releases and reports took me to other respected data sources like reports from the United Nations and the World Bank. These combined forecasts and analyses told me that the plunging birthrate was occurring in all first-world economic countries while poorer countries were having more babies, such that these are just a few of the headliner forecasts:

• By 2030 more than half of new working-age Americans will be immigrants, and this percentage will rise each year for as far as the Census Bureau can forecast.
• By 2080 the US population will begin to decrease.
• And by 2100 five of the ten most-populated nations in the world will be in Africa.

Looking at these reports, I sat at this same keyboard and asked myself, “Who knows this?” And the answer appears to be that no one has ever accumulated this data and reported it before.

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Further Reading: How Will AI, Tariffs, and Deportations Impact Our Workforce?

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This Is Why Retaining Top and Even Average Performers Matters More Than Ever Before

Putting aside our pandemic hangover, AI and other technology interventions, the work-from-home complications, nastier-than-ever politics, and even our ever-increasing attraction to our phones versus humans, nothing will impact our work more than the chart you see above… because our national and global business world is literally running out people. When you read about inflation, about supply chain woes and other econ-talk standbys, think lack of people first as it will drive up costs and drive down service for the rest of our lives.

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Further Reading: What China’s HR Leader told Me that Absolutely Cuts Turnover

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The Included Case Studies Tell the Truths

The book also includes six case studies that represent our client companies in healthcare, manufacturing, food processing, social services, and retail sales. The final case study reports on some highly confidential work we did with a classified section for a federal contractor. Each of these companies report having reduced turnover by at least 30%, ranging from a high of 58% in one company to another that discloses they have saved $81 million by working with us, so far. You’ll have fun reading these stories from these managers and executives.

So I thank you for joining me on this day of joy…and for continuing to read and forward to your friends these weekly Targeting Turnover reports. Together we can make improved employee retention the strongest indicator for success in our country.

—————————————————————

Ready to face the workforce crisis head-on?
Get your copy of Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis today. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold — including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

The post Writing the Book on Turnover — And Why Targeting Turnover Is the One Every Leader Needs Now appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Here’s a simple quiz with two possible answers – one right and one very, very wrong.
The wrong answer comes from “best practices.” The right one comes from science.

The Problem with “Best Practices”

What exactly are “best practices,” anyway? For decades I’ve read articles titled “5 Ways to Cut Turnover” or “10 Engagement Hacks.” The ideas always come from the same grab bag: recognize good performance, build career ladders, hold more town halls, add a new benefit.

The problem? These articles rarely, if ever, cite actual evidence. You never see: “By recognizing good performance, Company X cut turnover by 15%.”

“Best practices” are generic. They sound good. They spread fast. But there’s no proof they work.

What Science Tells Us

Science, on the other hand, gave us electricity, airplanes, and luggage with wheels – big changes that reshaped daily life. Science has also given us decades of research on why employees stay or quit. And it all points in one direction.

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Further Reading: Exit Interviews – More Like Autopsies or Toe Tags?

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Two Answers to the Quiz

Answer #1 (Wrong): The best way to cut turnover is to roll out one-size-fits-all programs.
That’s the path of most companies:

• Run engagement or exit surveys.
• Form a committee.
• Launch recognition programs, raise pay, or add benefits.

It’s a cycle – survey, program, disappointment, repeat. Employers keep doing it even as quits remain at historic highs.

Answer #2 (Right): The best way to cut turnover is to drive retention through each leader, teaching them to build one-on-one trust with every employee.

That’s not an opinion – it’s science. More than 25 studies confirm the same truth:

• The #1 reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their immediate supervisor.
• Gallup tells us 70% of an employee’s engagement comes from their relationship with their boss.
• Kenexa found employees’ opinions of supervisors’ influence how they view pay, benefits, advancement, and development.

Supervisors – not programs – are the lever. If you want retention, build trust.

Why Companies Stick with the Wrong Answer

So why do most organizations still chase one-size-fits-all fixes? Because they’re easier, and they’re all leaders know. It’s simpler to roll out a new program than to do the hard work of developing every manager. But simple doesn’t solve the problem.

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Further Reading: Why Stay Interviews Outlast Every Engagement Trend

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The Results When You Choose Science

Since the so-called “Great Resignation” began in 2021, the workforce crisis has only deepened. Baby Boomers are retiring in record numbers, Gen Z is the smallest generation yet, and every forecast says the same thing: employers will run out of workers before they run out of work.

That’s why turnover savings today matter more than ever. Consider what happens when organizations stop chasing programs and instead develop leaders to build trust:

• A major healthcare system reduced turnover 58%, saving $6.9 million.
• A food processing company cut turnover 49%, saving $2.3 million.
• A waste collection company slashed turnover 30% at one location, saving $240,000, then scaled the solution through train-the-trainer.

These aren’t abstract percentages. These are dollars reclaimed in industries where frontline workers are hardest to find and hardest to replace. And they prove a single point: trust between supervisors and employees isn’t just a “nice to have” – it’s the only lever that consistently drives retention results.

The Takeaway

In 2025, there are still two ways to cut turnover.
You can keep launching one-size-fits-all programs, watching quits climb, and wondering why nothing changes.
Or you can equip leaders to build trust with every employee – and see turnover finally fall.

That’s the argument I lay out in my new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It’s built on science, sharpened by results like these, and designed to help organizations finally solve retention where it matters most: through every leader, one employee at a time.

Dick Finnegan’s new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, publishes this September. Pre-order your copy now to get ahead of the looming workforce retention challenge. Want to purchase 25 copies or more for your team? Visit the bookpal bulk order page for a significant discount – 38% and more!

The post Two Ways to Cut Turnover. Only One Will Always Work. appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

That’s why, in our Finnegan’s Arrow model, we always start with dollars. Because dollars force CFOs and CEOs to see turnover for what it really is: a financial hemorrhage that can only be stopped by sustained, accountability-driven action. And unless retention is rooted in real financial terms, it risks becoming just another “flavor of the day” – the same way billions have been wasted on engagement surveys and short-lived fads that never moved the needle.

When we calculate the cost of turnover with our clients, finance is always in the room. Why? Because CFOs carry disproportionate weight in the C-Suite, and because they’ve never been taught how to measure turnover. Once they see the dollar drain, especially in lost productivity, they stop whispering about nickels and start demanding solutions.

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Further Reading: When Non-HR Executives Ask About Turnover (Again)

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Calculating the Cost of Lost Productivity

Turnover costs aren’t just recruiting ads, background checks, or onboarding. Those are the easy numbers. The hardest and most expensive cost is productivity lost when jobs sit vacant or new hires can’t yet perform at full capacity.

Consider:

• SHRM’s 2024 research¹ shows the average cost per hire now exceeds $5,000 – and that’s before you account for lost productivity.
• Gallup continues to report that turnover costs 1.5–2x annual salary², yet most organizations underestimate the productivity piece by tens of thousands per employee.
• Korn Ferry projects that by 2030 the global talent shortage could reach 85 million workers³, making each retained employee exponentially more valuable.

Our model puts those hidden productivity losses into CFO-ready terms. Here’s the basic framework:

1. Revenue per Employee: Enter your company’s annual revenue divided by FTEs. The Saratoga Institute standard is $240,000 per employee.⁴
2. Daily Revenue Contribution: Divide that number by 240 working days, showing how much revenue each employee generates daily. In this example, it’s $1,000/day.
3. Targeted Job Value: Adjust for the compensation of the job you’re analyzing. If the average is $50,000 but your targeted job pays $100,000, the daily value doubles to $2,000/day.

Then, calculate the lost days in two buckets:

• Open Vacancy Days: Every day the job sits open, producing nothing.
• Ramp-Up Days: The partial productivity window while the new hire gets up to speed.

Add A + B, multiply by the job’s daily value, and subtract any temporary help, overtime, or salary savings. The result is a dollar figure CFOs can’t ignore, because it directly links turnover to revenue loss.

And don’t worry about the math – our free calculator does it all for you.

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Further Reading: Should Referral Rewards Correlate to the Cost of Talent Turnover?

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Why This Matters Now

Turnover isn’t an HR metric; it’s the #1 unbudgeted cost your executives ignore. It slows growth, burns out your best people, and erodes trust in leadership. And as we’ve written in recent blogs, trust – not perks, not surveys – is the foundation of retention.

That’s why your first step must be to translate turnover into dollars. Once the C-Suite sees the millions bleeding away from lost productivity, they’ll finally recognize retention as a business problem, not an HR side issue.

The truth is simple: every day a job sits open, every week a new hire struggles to ramp up, your organization loses money. Our calculator makes that cost visible – and visibility creates urgency.

Turnover will only decline when leaders are held accountable. And accountability starts when CFOs and CEOs see turnover not as 24% vs. 25%, but as a line item big enough to demand action.

That’s why “Dollars” are first on Finnegan’s Arrow.

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Understand the data impacting workforce numbers and get in front of the looming retention and recruiting crisis. 

Dick Finnegan’s new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, publishes this September. Pre-order your copy now to get ahead of the looming workforce retention challenge. Want to purchase 25 copies or more for your team? Visit the bookpal bulk order page for a significant discount – 38% and more!

1. Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). 2024 Human Capital Benchmarking Report. SHRM, 2024.
2. Gallup. “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion.” Gallup Workplace, 2023.
3. Korn Ferry. Future of Work: The Global Talent Crunch. Korn Ferry Institute, 2023 update.
4. Saratoga Institute. Human Capital Benchmarking Database. PwC Saratoga, long-standing dataset.

The post Turnover’s Biggest Price Tag Isn’t Recruiting – It’s Lost Productivity appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Avoiding the “Sunday Scaries”

It’s Sunday evening in the Finnegan house. Should we take a walk in the stifling Florida heat? Or bail out and watch a movie? Maybe barbecue something if we have the energy for it?

But then like taking on a shadow, we realize that the weekend is almost over. And Monday morning is just a few hours away.

For most of us, Sunday night doesn’t feel like Saturday night. Or even like Tuesday night. It has an identity of its own and that identity, believe it or not, has a name. Sunday Scaries.

And there is data to back it up. LinkedIn found 80% of working Americans worry about the upcoming week on Sundays,[i] while another study determined the average time of arrival for “Sunday Scaries” is during that afternoon at 3:58 PM.[ii] No kidding. That’s major-league precise.

I find myself punching back, saying I should live in the present, that I deserve every hour of my weekend. But by then I’m already three toes into work because I’ve begun talking to myself about my “scaries”.

Studies also tell us that we tend to stay up later on Sunday nights than we should, likely to gain more of that “owed” time, and to somehow delay the inevitable.[iii] Those of you who work non-traditional schedules probably experience these same feelings, just on other days and times.

I recently told these findings to a client company executive who said Sunday night is the only night he takes a sleeping pill. He nodded his head at these findings with no surprise at all.

—-

Further Reading: The Crucial Time of Day for Stay/Leave Decisions

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The Suggested Fixes

Here’s just one list to at least partially solve the “scaries:[iv]

• Unplug from your phone or social media.
• Try a mediation or relaxation app.
• Maintain a good work-life balance.
• Do some exercise.
• Get some fresh air.
• Schedule fun activities for Sunday afternoon and evening.
• Split up errands throughout the week so you don’t feel like you wasted your entire Sunday doing them.
• Have one glass of wine, not two.
• Or worst case, talk with a therapist.

I like the list, every part of it. But to lean on John Lennon by allowing ourselves to imagine, let’s examine what would be the very best part of a perfect job for us to go to on Monday mornings.

Back to Picking a Fight with Buffett and Hertzberg

The best part of a perfect job would be that we feel a strong sense of mutual trust with everyone we work with, especially our manager. We trust our manager to be both open and supportive, we trust our colleagues to share what they know and confess what they don’t, we trust our customers to be direct and open about what they like about our product and what they wish was better. And we trust our employees to show up every day, on time, and to do their best.

No job is perfect, but we should all treasure our jobs if most of the above is true and especially the manager part…and abandon our jobs if most of this isn’t happening. Life is too short to stay in a bad job. And as executives it’s our job to MAKE our teams’ jobs to reflect this high-trust environment.

Warren Buffett is known to have said, “Trust is like the air we breathe – when it’s present nobody really notices; when it’s absent everybody notices,”^[v] …and by saying so Buffett echoed the historic work of Fredrick Herzberg. It was Herzberg back in 1959 who declared the difference between actions that motivate like recognition versus those that we quietly take for granted until they disappear, like trust.^[vi]

Buffett and Herzberg are both on my hero list, yet I’d look forward to debating either of them on whether employees take a trust-building supervisor for granted as each of them imply. And the reason why today’s employees so value a trusted supervisor is because most of us have lived on the other, darker side with a jerk boss who had little interest in or how-to knowledge to ever build trust. These are the supervisors who keep to themselves, grumble about their co-workers above and below them, and who make no efforts to learn about their employees or share information about themselves. And the worst of them blame their turnover on pay and HR, understate their own impact, and mislead in other ways…directing their teams by their own behaviors to skimp on their work and to ultimately quit.

—-

Further Reading: Who Talks About Their Boss Over Dinner? Everyone!

—–

Our Job is to Cut Turnover

We pride ourselves in helping client companies reduce employee turnover by 30% and more, consistently. But there are times when companies deserve to lose a few really good employees, especially if they assign those employees to lousy bosses. We also know the best way to lose good workers is to retain workers who deserve to terminated. So to build a high-retention organization, neither poor-performing leaders nor poor-performing employees can be tolerated.

A few weeks ago I mentioned “psychological safety” as a relatively new term that describes something important.

McKinsey’s research defines psychological safety as feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up, to disagree openly, to surface concerns without fear of negative repercussions or pressure to sugarcoat bad news. They go on to say that psychological safety is both a driver of worker productivity and also that we have too little of it. McKinsey’s studies make clear that a psychological-safe environment improves retention, engagement, and more.^[iv]

My educated guess is that employees who work in psychologically safe climates come to work with a smile on Monday mornings, having gotten to bed on time and feel fully refreshed from their weekends. We all deserve that, too.

—–

Further Reading: On Burnout, Barry, Stay Interviews, and “Psychological Safety”

—–

Understand the data impacting workforce numbers and get in front of the looming retention and recruiting crisis. 

Dick Finnegan’s new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, publishes this September. Pre-order your copy now to get ahead of the looming workforce retention challenge. Want to purchase 25 copies or more for your team? Visit the bookpal bulk order page for a significant discount – 38% and more!

[i] https://www.linkedin.com/blog/member/career/your-guide-to-winning-work-decoding-the-sunday-scaries

[ii] https://swns-research.medium.com/study-majority-of-americans-come-down-with-a-case-of-the-sunday-scaries-every-week-2ce405acb626

[iii] https://swns-research.medium.com/study-majority-of-americans-come-down-with-a-case-of-the-sunday-scaries-every-week-2ce405acb626

[iv] https://time.com/7275089/what-are-sunday-scaries/

[v] Paul Fiorelli, “Integrity Builds Trust: What? So What? and Now What?” Institute of Business Ethics, February 23, 2023; https://www.ibe.org.uk/resource/integrity-builds-trust-what-so-what-and-now-what-blog.html

[vi] Charlotte Nickerson, “Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory Of Motivation-Hygiene,” Simply Psychology, September 28, 2023; https://www.simplypsychology.org/herzbergs-two-factor-theory.html

The post Trust and the Sunday Scaries appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics lost her job over it because she supposedly “rigged” the data.[i] Her BLS also greatly lowered the numbers of new jobs for the two previous months. Most gains were in healthcare and social assistance, two categories that are in must-have-workers situations because too many of us are getting older. 

Nearly every other CEO is sitting still, holding back on spending because our economy is in high-stage drama regarding tariffs and immigration.

My Own Stake in This

For employers and for those who are reading along with me, the back-and-forths, on-and-offs about immigration matter more. Tariffs impact companies that import goods and also those of us who will pay more for those goods, whereas immigration will impact whether we can make and import those goods at all.

In my new book titled Targeting Turnover, the same name as this newsletter, I conducted extensive interviews and data dives with the U.S. Census Bureau, and their data then motivated me to search out labor and population projections from the United Nations. My initial query was about two major population trends we all know but it seemed no one had fully researched them, being…

When we connect the many dots between baby boomers leaving the workforce and our steadily decreasing birthrate, how many remaining workers will there actually be?

The answer is NOT NEARLY ENOUGH. Please pardon my shouting but I was as surprised as anyone once I saw both the short-term and the long-term data as the result of this question.

One easy way to explain the outcome is that for as far as our eyes can see, for the rest of this century, at best we will add about one-fifth of the workers to the working-age group of 18 to 64 for each year versus the number that we have added in the past. To give a simple example, if in each past year we had added five new workers, for future years we will add just one.

And beginning in 2030, just an eye- blink in the speed of time, more than half of those who we add to the ages 18-to-64 group will be immigrants, will have been born outside of the US.^[ii]

—–

Further Reading: Without Immigrants, U.S. Working-Age Population Would Shrink

——

Fortunately, or Not, It’s A Global Problem

When I first charted this data, working here on this same keyboard and at this same desk, my first reaction was “How will the US maintain its dominant economic position if we are running out of workers?”

The answer is I don’t really know, but that every industrialized country is in the identical sinking boat, that their births peaked after WWII and have steadily declined since. And while various nations are paying women to have babies by thinking a thousand dollars here or there will help, the absolutely only real-life conclusion is that the countries that immigrate the most and the best immigrants will win.

Some of the data is absolutely astounding. The German working population will reduce by a third by the end of this century, along with Italy, Spain, and Greece losing half of their total workforces, and then Poland, Portugal, Romania, Japan, and China will all lose up to two-thirds of their labor force.^[iii] Another report details that by 2030, that soon, the world will be short by 85 million workers, the approximate population of Germany. Six million of these shortages will be here in the United States.^[iv]

But these two projections grabbed me the most:

• By 2080 the US population will actually begin to decline.^[v]
• And by 2100, 5 of the 10 most populated nations in the world are projected to be in Africa.^[vi]

Back to Current Affairs…and A Remarkable New Trend

The immigration-related headlines are about ICE grabbing US residents of various backgrounds along with the very attention-grabbing alligator-something detention camp here in Florida. But here are a few behind-the-scenes immigration activities that contribute to our economy’s being stuck:

• Our president has indicated that immigration enforcement will slow down for farms and hospitality jobs, as word has gotten through that we cannot grow food without foreign workers.[vii]

• Mark Zuckerberg has searched for and hired the eleven smartest people in the world to build his AI platform, and they are all from other countries.[viii]

• Our federal government is so fearful of our air traffic controller shortage that they are recruiting foreigners for these essential and stressful jobs.^[ix]

And this is happening as our government just proudly announced they have achieved “negative-net-migration”,[x] whatever that is.[xi]

—–

Further Reading: What China’s HR Leader told Me that Absolutely Cuts Turnover

——

Americans Are Watching

When I finished the book manuscript several months ago, Gallup data told us that a greater number of Americans wanted less immigration, not more. I attributed this to our cable news stations’ regular reporting on issues at the Mexican border, regardless of those networks’ political preferences. But more recently Gallup tells us this:

Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.[xii]

One thing I know for sure is that America’s sheer survival will depend on the best immigrants wanting to be here…and they must be lured by what we used to call the American spirit, that statue of liberty thing, beginning with all men…and women…were created equal. But if that’s not your thing, the sheer numbers tell us there are not and will not be enough native-born Americans to keep pace. And we cannot afford to attract immigrants with billions of dollars the way Mark Zuckerberg did.

Let’s close by adding one more example of America’s workforce shortage. Our Air Force is so short on recruits that since they cannot recruit foreigners, they have instead modified their fitness requirements by raising the acceptable levels of body fat. Our Air Force just got fatter in order to better find and retain more recruits.^[xiii]

———

Understand the data impacting workforce numbers and get in front of the looming retention and recruiting crisis.

Dick Finnegan’s new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, publishes this September. Pre-order your copy now to get ahead of the looming workforce retention challenge. Want to purchase 25 copies or more for your team? Visit the bookpal bulk order page for a significant discount – 38% and more!

[i] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fact-check-trumps-claims-jobless-numbers-rigged/story?id=124353890

[ii] Jonathan Vespa, Lauren Medina, David M. Armstrong, “Demographic Turning Points for the United States: Population Projections for 2020 to 2060,” US Census Bureau, revised 2022; https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.pdf

[iii] Sebastian Dettmers, “The Great People Shortage is coming — and it’s going to cause global economic chaos,” Business Insider, October 20, 2022; https://www.businessinsider.com/great-labor-shortage-looming-population-decline-disaster-global-economy-2022-10#:~:text=In%20the%20coming%20years%2C%20many,these%20businesses%20will%20also%20shrink

[iv] Ivana Johnston, “Turning Silver Into Gold: Are Unretired Workers A Solution To The $8.5 Trillion Labor Shortage?”, Forbes, March 25, 2024; https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2024/03/25/turning-silver-into-gold-are-unretired-workers-a-solution-to-the-85-trillion-labor-shortage/#:~:text=According%20to%20predictions%2C%20by%202030,first%20time%20in%20U.S.%20history.

[v] US Census Bureau, “US Population to Begin Declining in Second Half of Century,” November 9, 2023 https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/population-projections.html

[vi]  “By 2100, five of the world’s 10 largest countries are projected to be in Africa,”, Pew Research Center, June 18, 2019; https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/ft_19-06-17_worldpopulation_by-2100-five-of-10-largest-countries-projected-to-be-in-africa-png/

[vii] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/us/politics/trump-ice-raids-farms-hotels.html

[viii] The Times of India, July 5^th, 2025

[ix] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/foreign-faa-controllers-trump-hired/683539/?gift=ScXkEZrrEEs7lRNagpuPC1ejJTdJnMl7t1iBCwYhDT0

[x] https://time.com/7307367/negative-net-migration-trump-deportations/

[xi] https://time.com/7307367/negative-net-migration-trump-deportations/

[xii] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx

[xiii] Rachel S. Cohen, “Fatter recruits now welcome as Air Force revises its rules,” Air Force Times, April 3, 2023; https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2023/04/03/fatter-recruits-now-welcome-as-air-force-revises-its-rules/

The post One Reason the US Added Only 73,000 Jobs in July: Immigration appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

These aren’t abstract theories. They’re what I saw firsthand working with senior leaders at a global pharmaceutical company worried about turnover in a talent market that feels, frankly, ruthless.

Their challenge? Each scientist or PhD who quits costs them six figures in direct loss – often high six figures when you count delayed product launches and lost market share. Worse, the old advantage of location has vanished. Their competitors can now poach talent anywhere with remote offers. The headhunter’s call is always just a Slack ping away.

They asked for help. We worked through our Finnegan’s Arrow retention process – where managers conduct Stay Interviews and then meet 60 days later to review exactly what they heard, what they did, and what risks remain. This is the step most companies skip: making managers own solutions.

We start these meetings with something uncomfortable: a pie chart.

• Green: Employees forecast to stay 12+ months.
• Yellow: 6–12 months.
• Red: Less than 6 months.

We make managers predict voluntary and involuntary turnover at the individual level. That single act changes the game. Managers know their boss will ask them about those forecasts, especially when someone quits.

It gives us a mantra that should be in every HR leader’s toolkit:

“Don’t lose a green.”

When managers know their retention forecasts will be scrutinized, they start owning them. And they start finding solutions that actually fit the employee and the work.

Here are two of the most creative and impactful solutions that came out of that process.

1. A Stay Interview That Solved a Strategic Disconnect

One manager described an employee ready to walk because they disagreed with the company’s product development decisions. Usually, that’s where managers throw up their hands:

“Not my fault. I can’t change corporate strategy.”

But this manager didn’t stop there. He told the group:

“I asked myself: how can I help my employee see what I see? So I talked to my manager, got approval, and invited this employee to join me at a product development meeting. Just once or twice, but enough for them to hear the rationale directly and even provide input.”

This is what manager accountability for retention looks like.

Imagine the difference for that employee when the manager goes back and says:

“You raised valid concerns. I’d like you to come to the meeting so you can hear the thinking first-hand – and so they can hear from you.”

That’s trust-building in action. That’s turning a Red forecast into a Green.

2. A “Walk in My Shoes” Solution for Career Growth

Here’s another problem they faced that many of you will recognize:

Their turnover analysis showed too many high-value employees leaving around the five-year mark. The pattern was clear: career expectations were exceeding actual opportunities.

And before you say that’s just the way it is, consider how they responded.

They didn’t just post jobs and hope.

Managers brainstormed and developed a plan they called “Walk in My Shoes.” The idea?

Let employees explore roles in other departments before openings exist.

One manager volunteered to give up an employee for a full week to shadow another team. Another suggested one day per week for a few months.

Everyone agreed:

Better to keep them in the company – even in another department – than lose them to a competitor.

That’s agile retention. That’s real leadership.

The Big Lesson

If you take one thing away, make it this:

Managers will find retention solutions when they have retention tools – and when they know they’re accountable for results.

This company went a step further. One leader said:

“Our retention strategy just became agile – led by each manager, not HR alone.”

That’s the mindset shift HR leaders need to drive.

Stop looking for one-size-fits-all answers. Start holding managers accountable for knowing why people stay or leave – and for doing something about it.

This Isn’t Just Pharma. It’s Universal.

We’ve applied this approach in manufacturing, healthcare, food processing, call centers – anywhere turnover hurts.

The results? Consistently reducing turnover 30% or more.

And let’s be clear: that’s not because Stay Interviews are magic.

It’s because they force real conversations that identify real risks – and managers learn they’re expected to act on them.

This is the work. This is what changes retention. And it’s ready for you to use.

Ready to Make Managers Accountable for Retention?

If you’re tired of losing good people – and tired of hearing managers say “there’s nothing I can do” – let’s talk.

Email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and let’s figure out how to help your managers own retention and reduce turnover by 30% or more this year.

The post Stay Interviews Really Work: Two Proven Retention Wins appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.