Issue 001

One in three of the people you hired this year will be gone before Christmas. They will not send a resignation letter with proper notice. They will just stop caring, stop showing up fully, and eventually take a call they should not have picked up. You will miss it until it is too late.

This week is about the leaders catching that before it happens, and the plays they made to do it.

Welcome to Issue 001 of The Work Life Reporter. This week you get:

Let’s get into it.

In early 2025, Amazon required all corporate employees back in the office five days a week. No exceptions, no hybrid option. CEO Andy Jassy framed it as a culture move. What followed was well-documented: an internal petition signed by hundreds of employees, high-profile exits of tenured talent, and a communication vacuum that took months to fill. By the time Randstad published their 2025 Workmonitor, only 49% of employees globally said they trust their employers to create a workplace where everyone can thrive. Amazon's handling of the mandate did not help that number.

The failure was not the policy itself. Reasonable people disagree about the value of in-person work. The failure was the absence of honest reasoning. When leadership says "this is good for culture" but cannot point to what specifically was not working, employees hear something different: they hear that their lived experience of the previous three years does not count. Research by the Pitt Business School found that imposed return-to-office mandates do not improve employee or company performance, and that employees experience them less as managerial decisions and more as signals about organisational values.

The leaders who handled policy changes well in 2025 did one thing differently: they told the truth, named the real friction, and gave people something concrete to hold on to.

According to Enboarder's 2025 HR Leader survey, one in three new hires leaves within their first 90 days. For 20% of respondents, half their new employees leave in that same window. The cost of replacing an employee runs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary, depending on the role. Do that calculation across a year and it stops being an HR metric and starts being a business problem that belongs on the board agenda.

Here is the counterintuitive part: companies that run a structured 90-day onboarding programme see 82% higher retention and employees reaching full productivity 70% faster. Despite this, only 29% of companies have such a programme in place. The other 71% are running on gut feel, ad hoc manager introductions, and a welcome lunch someone has to remind themselves to organise.

The reason most onboarding fails is not neglect. It is definition. Most people leaders treat onboarding as the process that ends at the close of week one, maybe week four. The Enboarder data points to Day 44 as a critical inflection point in long-term retention. Most of what shapes whether someone stays is determined in the weeks after Day 44, when no one is actively paying attention anymore.

When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, one of the first things his leadership team noticed was how much signal was being lost between senior leaders and the people doing the actual work. The fix was not a listening tour or an all-hands Q&A. It was a systematic commitment to skip-level conversations: direct meetings between senior leaders and employees two or three levels below, with no manager in the room. Microsoft's subsequent cultural shift from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all” organisation required senior leaders to have conversations they simply could not have through their direct reports alone.

What skip-levels surface that town halls do not: the practical friction polite people never raise in public. Process bottlenecks. Team dynamics a manager cannot see because they are too close to them. Information that junior employees would never volunteer in a formal setting but will share directly if a senior leader asks a specific, private question and actually waits for the answer.

The format matters. A skip-level is not a manager performance review dressed up as a conversation. Done badly, it destroys the trust of both parties simultaneously. Done with discipline, it is one of the most efficient sources of organisational signal a people leader has access to.

HR leaders at Meritrust Credit Union made a deliberate change: instead of waiting for exit interviews — which come too late and are often too guarded to be useful — they introduced structured stay interviews across the organisation. The finding that surfaced immediately: six out of ten employees felt they were not being adequately recognised for their work. That same pattern showed up in exit interview data as one of the top reasons people had already left. The information was not missing. It just came twelve months too late.

Stay interviews surface the same signal as exit interviews, but three to twelve months earlier. According to SHRM data, adoption of stay interviews jumped from 33% of organisations in 2022 to 46% in 2023, and continues to rise as HR teams shift from reactive to proactive retention. Employee retention is now a top-three priority for CEOs and the number one priority for one in three HR leaders. That is a structural change in how the people function is being asked to operate.

The mistake most organisations make is treating the stay interview as an informal chat rather than a structured diagnostic. Done with intention and consistency, and with a genuine commitment to act on what you hear, it is one of the most cost-effective retention tools available.

In 2025, Dr Gurnak Singh Dosanjh, Deputy Chief Clinical Information Officer at NHS Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland ICB, faced a challenge familiar to most large organisations: a team being asked to change the way they worked — again — while already exhausted from years of COVID response, NHS restructuring, integrated care system formation, and digital transformation initiatives that had not always landed the way leadership expected.

The move Gurnak made was not a strategy document. It was a structural one: he built a community of practice specifically designed to put frontline clinical staff in the conversation about digital change from the start, not downstream of it. The Equity Charter community of practice, launched under his leadership in late 2025, brought in voices from communities most at risk of being left behind by digital healthcare, ensuring the people closest to patients were shaping the systems they would be using, not just receiving them. In 2026, Gurnak was recognised as Digital Leader of the Year (Highly Commended) at the HSJ Digital Awards for this work.

The lesson is not specific to healthcare. Most transformation programmes fail not because the strategy is wrong but because the people implementation is. When teams are already stretched, the instinct of senior leaders is to push harder. The leaders getting better outcomes are doing the opposite: slowing the process enough to put the right people inside it.

Most engagement surveys ask some version of: "Are you satisfied with your role?" "Do you feel valued?" "Would you recommend us as an employer?" These are satisfaction questions, not diagnostic ones. They tell you the temperature. They do not tell you where the fire is.

The gap shows up at analysis time. Leadership reviews the scores, segments by team or tenure, identifies the low numbers, and then runs a focus group to find out why. The survey was never designed to answer that question. It was designed to track a score.

A retention diagnostic asks different questions: "What would need to change for this to be a better place to work?" "What is the one thing that, if fixed, would make the biggest difference to your day?" "Is there anything you have considered leaving over in the past six months?" These feel uncomfortable to include. That is precisely why most surveys do not. Consider adding a four-question diagnostic rider to the end of your next cycle. Keep it anonymous, keep it specific, and commit to sharing the findings even when they are uncomfortable. Especially when they are uncomfortable.

Most managers wait too long to address performance, then jump straight to a formal process when things deteriorate. The performance improvement plan arrives as a surprise to the employee, a formality to the manager, and a problem for HR to document. Nobody wins. And in most cases, nobody needed to lose.

There is a simpler model: three conversations, structured but informal, before anything formal enters the record. The first is an observation: "I have noticed X. I want to understand what is going on." Not an accusation, not a warning. An honest observation with space for the employee to respond. The second is an impact conversation: "Here is what I am seeing, and here is why it matters for the team and for you." Specific. Direct. No softening that obscures the point. The third is a direction conversation: "Here is what needs to change and what support I can offer. I would like to check back in [two weeks/a month] to see how things are going." This is where expectations get documented, but in a way that reads as a manager who cares, not a paper trail being assembled.

In most cases, the first conversation is enough. In the cases where it is not, you will know you did everything reasonable before the formal process started, and so will the employee.

People leaders often struggle in budget conversations because they are speaking in outcomes ("employee satisfaction is up," "our eNPS improved") while CFOs are speaking in costs. The disconnect is not usually about values. It is about language.

The translation that tends to work: replacement cost. SHRM estimates that replacing an employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary, depending on seniority and role. A team of 50 people with a 20% annual turnover rate has a replacement cost of roughly 10 full salaries, every year, that shows up nowhere on a people dashboard. That is the number to lead with.

Go into the budget conversation with the cost you are preventing, not the investment you are requesting. "Our retention rate went from 78% to 85% this year. At an average salary of £X, that represents approximately £Y in avoided replacement costs." Then ask for the budget. CFOs understand risk mitigation. Frame people investment as a cost-control measure, not a culture initiative, and the conversation changes entirely.

He has since led work on virtual wards, digital pathways for long-term conditions, deterioration detection, and proactive care models for Learning Disabilities and Home First care. In 2026, the HSJ Digital Awards named him Digital Leader of the Year (Highly Commended). But the work he is most focused on is harder to put on a slide: making sure the digital transformation of the NHS does not widen the health inequalities it was supposed to address.

In this week’s Spotlight, Gurnak unpacks what change leadership looks like at the clinical front line, how to build communities of practice that actually have influence, and why the word ‘digital’ should eventually disappear from the NHS conversation entirely.

Gurnak’s work on the Equity Charter community of practice is not a DEI initiative in the traditional sense. It is a recognition that patient-facing digital tools are only as good as the reach of the people who can use them. A virtual ward or online appointment system that cannot be navigated by someone with low digital literacy, limited English, or a disability does not reduce health inequality. It compounds it. Most digital health programmes have this conversation too late, if at all.

Most healthcare digital projects involve clinicians at the UAT stage — user acceptance testing — which happens after the product is essentially done and the structural decisions have already been made. Gurnak's approach is co-design from the start, with the people closest to patients as decision-makers rather than reviewers. The process is slower, but the outcomes are stickier and significantly less likely to sit unused six months after go-live.

NHS staff have lived through years of restructuring, COVID response, integrated care system formation, and now a wave of AI. The honest approach, Gurnak says, is to name the fatigue before asking for anything more. Coming in with another initiative without acknowledging what has already happened means people have switched off before you have started. The acknowledgement is not weakness. It is the prerequisite for credibility.

Adoption, not implementation, is the real metric. Most digital health programmes measure go-live dates. Gurnak argues the more honest measure is sustained clinical use: whether a tool became part of how people actually work, or became the system nobody uses that everyone is still paying for. That framing changes how you design, communicate, and follow up on any technology programme.

Gurnak’s clinical perspective gives him something pure digital leaders rarely have: a patient. Not a user persona or a journey map. An actual patient who came in on a Tuesday morning with three overlapping problems, limited time, and a GP on their eighth appointment of the day. That grounding shapes every digital decision he makes, and it is what he says is most often missing from digital strategy documents.

Thank you, Gurnak.

And that is a wrap for Issue 001. Something in here land? Hit reply and tell us what was useful. Or what we got wrong. Follow The Work Life Reporter on LinkedIn for what we share between issues.

PS. Know someone who leads people and would find this useful? Forward it on. Ten seconds to share, a lot longer to write. PPS. Got a story, a leader, or a topic you would like us to dig into? Reply with your ideas.