Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret

Your organization is running at less than half its human potential, and the things you're doing to fix it are making it worse. Not the talent, not the intention, it's the system that's broken. The apps, the surveys, the resilience workshops— none of them are addressing what actually drives performance. And while you're investing in those, the gap between what your people are capable of and what they are producing keeps widening. Here is what closing that gap by fixing the underlying system could unlock for you. The organizations that have figured this out are 21% more profitable, 3 times more creative, and outperforming the S&P by 11%. Not from hiring better people, not from running another engagement survey that produces the same action plan as last year, or spending more dollars on wellness programs that are delivering zero ROI and don't reduce burnout levels. These organizations are doing it through building a better system around the people they already have and supporting the managers who are carrying the weight of every people problem in your organization. I have spent the last several years working with teams at large companies like Danone, ConAgra, MUFG, Google, startups like Radical, not-for-profits like US Ski and Snowboard, academic universities like CU Leeds, and government organizations like OEDIT On helping them tackle these exact challenges. That is what this video is all about. If you are a CEO or CHRO watching this, you have probably already spent significant money on wellbeing. You rolled out the app, you ran the mindfulness program, you sent the engagement survey. Maybe scores moved a little, but the performance gap is still there. Your managers are still burning out, and the same problems keeps showing up on every survey year after year. That is not a coincidence. That is a problem of misdiagnosis. Here is what the data actually shows. Most organizations are operating at less than 50% of their true human capital potential. Compare that to 70%+ performance benchmarks you expect from your physical assets like factories, warehouses, and data centers. You run your machines and technology at near peak efficiency, your most important asset is running at less than half. The Oxford 2024 research confirms that most wellbeing programs are producing zero measurable ROI, not because your intention is wrong, but because the underlying root cause driving stress, burnout, and disengagement is fundamentally misdiagnosed. And here is the divide that's opening up right now. The companies that have figured this out are 21% more profitable, experience 65% lower attrition, and drive 2 to 3.5% alpha versus other competitors in shareholder returns. The companies that are still following the status quo are watching the same problems compound year after year. People present but not performing, capable but not contributing, engaged enough to stay but not enough to make a difference. Which side of the divide do you want to be on? That is a choice you can make today. I spent 17 years as a partner at McKinsey building strategies and driving transformations for some of the world's largest organizations. Everything in my external world was filled with green lights— success, recognition, title, respect, family, friends— and yet I was waking up every morning so anxious I needed to throw up. Along the way, I had checked every box— top grades from leading universities, career, family, and friends— everything the success script said would make me happy. And I felt none of it. I was miserably successful. So I spent the next several years understanding why. I read over 750 books. I studied with psychologists, neuroscientists, and spiritual teachers. I researched leading organizations that were excelling on both performance and health. I interviewed hundreds of leaders who were both highly successful and flourishing. That's when I discovered that flourishing, genuine human performance, is not a passive state. It's a trainable discipline. I also discovered the hard truth. This was not just a me problem. This was a we problem. Our ways of working had become fundamentally broken and not serving either the people or the shareholders. 60% of people were stressed, 20% were burnt out, and less than 20% found meaning at work. As a result, businesses were leaving $12 trillion+ in economic value on the table. Despite 25+ years of research in this field, these science-based interventions that can help individuals, teams, and organizations unlock their true potential were not making their way into their core ways of working. So I started experimenting, practiced everything myself and with the internal teams that I was leading. I realized that to build wellbeing and flourishing as a foundation for high performance, we needed to tackle this challenge at 3 levels simultaneously. That is why I founded Happiness Squad. That is why I wrote Hardwired for Happiness. And that 3-tiered approach is what I'm going to walk you through today. Before I get into the 3 steps, if you already know you want help implementing this in your organization, you can book a strategy call in the description below. We have worked with MUFG, ConAgra, Pepsi, and dozens of organizations across every industry. But if you wanna understand how this works first, step 1 is the most important place to start. Here is the first reason most people and culture initiatives fail. The old way. HR or L&D designs a training program or leadership offsite. They run a mindfulness workshop. They invite an inspirational speaker or launch a fancy new digital app. The program is rolled out with fanfare to the organization and managers are asked to implement it. There might be 2 days of sparked energy, some new skills, real intention, and then within 3 weeks, nothing has changed. The app is forgotten. The inspiration has died down and people are as drained, disengaged, and stressed out as before. This is because you cannot build a high-performing culture from one-size-fits-all or one-and-done type of interventions that put the entire burden on the individuals. If your leaders are running on fear and pressure, if they're operating from a chronic stress response without the internal skills to manage it, That energy moves through every layer of the organization. The training never sticks because the system it is trying to change is being continuously reinforced from the top. People keep operating from the same stress-driven reactive habits they always had, and no behavior change happens. The new way: take a team-based approach that personalizes the intervention for individuals and gives them space to practice in order to build new habits over time. Build cohorts of the willing, engage them in a multi-month facilitator-led learning journey, integrating the principles of habit formation like micro-practices that are 5 minutes or less, accountability buddies and peer groups to provide inspiration and support, and an infrastructure that keeps them immersed in the learning. What we call the Sunflower Model is a set of 9 evidence-based daily practices grounded in the science of happiness that can help employees build the adaptability, resilience, and high-performance skills that make everything else possible without burning out. Our research across nearly 1,000 adults shows that when people consistently engage in 4 or more of these practices, the benefits stop being additive and start compounding. The brain begins to rewire. Default stress responses are interrupted. Leaders stop reacting from fear and start leading from possibility. This transformation is what we deliver through the Rewire program, a cohort-based program embedded in the flow of daily work at the team level, so accountability and connection happen together. You know, I think about a leader I worked with who told me after 6 weeks, I've been in back-to-back meetings for 15 years, and I have never noticed what I was doing to me and my organization until I stopped reacting and started choosing. That is not a soft outcome. That is a leader who now makes better decisions, retains better people, and builds a culture that actually reflects their values. In a food company, 86% of the people in the cohort reported meaningful improvements in their ability to manage stress. 65% integrated 3 or more practices into their daily routine. They crossed the threshold where results start to compound. They reported greater creativity, greater connectivity with each other, greater work satisfaction, and higher productivity. When you start here with the individual, with the leader, the rest of the system has a foundation to build on. Step 1 builds the individual capacity. Step 2 addresses the system those individuals are operating inside. Because you can develop the most resilient leader in the world, and then when you send them back into a workplace with impossible workloads, back-to-back meetings, role conflicts, limited autonomy, you can watch everything you just built dissolve. Here is what most organizations miss. The McKinsey Health Institute found that workplace demands, things like toxic behavior, unsustainable workload, role ambiguity, conflict, are 7 times more predictive of burnout than any wellbeing benefit you can offer. 7 times. You can address all the enablers in the world, but if you do not figure out a way to reduce the demands, you are pouring water into a leaking bucket. The new way: diagnose the environment to identify what's broken and fix the system at the job, team, and organizational level. Think about it this way. Imagine what your workplace would look like and what it could make possible if people found meaning at work versus saw it as just a way to earn a paycheck. If they were energized to show up Monday morning and felt more excited rather than exhausted at the end of the day from what they had accomplished. Imagine if they were learning and growing every day and using their strengths. Imagine if they felt valued, seen, trusted, and psychologically safe to contribute their best ideas? And what if they worked in operating systems designed for them to be at their cognitive best rather than in back-to-back meetings? These 5 levers are at the foundation of our PERL model: purpose, energy, awareness, relationships, and life force. When these 5 are working together and integrated into how work gets done, people bring their best. When one or more breaks down, performance quietly erodes, and no amount of training and wellness benefits are going to compensate. Here is one lever I consistently find which is at the root of most performance and health losses at organizations and that few have optimized. Life force. Employees at a company that has mastered life force operate with 80% slack with clear goals and roles. They have learned to make stress their ally. They have sustainable workloads with autonomy and flexibility built in, and they work in neuro-friendly ways with uninterrupted time to be at their cognitive best versus stuck in back-to-back meetings. This is your Achilles heel, and this is the strongest predictor of burnout in our entire model. The paradox is that your people probably trust each other. In our research, 90% of employees say That their team trusts them to do their job well. But that trust is being undermined every single day by a system nobody is redesigning. High trust, low boundary, suboptimal results. Fix the system and watch what that trust can actually produce. At a leading organization, 100% of participants improved their ability to manage stress after we addressed the environment. 84% reported enhanced team cohesion, And 75% felt greater job satisfaction. All of this was achieved not from adding a benefit, but from fixing how work was designed. Steps 1 and 2 address the individual and organizational environment. Step 3 is what makes both of those stick and scale across the entire organization. The old way: train senior leaders, drive a culture transformation program top-down, and then rely on middle managers, the people who carry the entire weight of daily human performance, to translate and implement it all without ever being equipped to do so. Middle managers are at the center of gravity for all organizations, and yet they are the most overburdened, under-resourced, underskilled, and burnt out, sandwiched between demands from the top and the bottom. The middle managers determine whether a culture actually lives in practice or just exists in the value statements. And most of them have never been taught formally how to actually lead people. They were promoted because they were great individual contributors. Nobody taught them how to manage stress in their teams, how to coach their individual team members, how to have difficult conversations, how to create psychological safety, how to identify when someone is drifting from engagement to quiet quitting before it's too late. The new way, systematically upskill people leaders with the specific skills that drive team performance. Our integrated programs give people leaders the technical and human skills to lead effectively in complex, high-pressure environments. Quarterly cohort-based sessions with bite-sized personalized learning, agile sprints embedded in daily work to implement the change, the ability to recognize which intervention their team needs and when. The language to have conversations that actually move people forward instead of creating more anxiety. I remember one manager telling me, I've been managing people for 8 years and nobody ever taught me how to actually talk to someone who is burning out. I just kept giving them more feedback on their work. That is the gap and it is everywhere. The Middle Manager Upskilling Program is what we ran at US Ski and Snowboard. That is what we ran for an integrated North America procurement team at Danone. And that's the program we are running with the supply chain team at ConAgra. Running integrated programs that address interventions at individual, team, job, and organization level allows us to see significant improvements in both performance and health. Here is the mistake nearly every organization makes. They try to fix their people instead of fixing the system their people work inside. They send their leaders to a 2-day training. They roll out a meditation app. They run the annual survey. And when nothing changes, they assume it's a people problem. Not enough resilience, not enough engagement, not enough drive. This is not a people problem. It is a systems problem. And systems can be redesigned. That is what the 3-part Flourishing Operating System does. It builds the individual capacity to perform. It redesigns the organizational environment to stop working against them. And it equips the people in the middle to make most of those things stick every single day. When you implement part of this, something sticks while others don't. When you do all 3, everything compounds. That is what flourishing really is. It's not a wellness initiative. It's a competitive operating system. If you are ready to find out exactly where your organization's gaps are, take our free assessment online and book a Pearl diagnostic call in the description below. We will look at all 5 dimensions, quantify what the gaps are costing you, and map what addressing all 3 levels could look like in your specific context. Organizations do not outperform because they have better people. They outperform because they create environments where ordinary people consistently can do extraordinary work. Make flourishing your competitive edge.