You cannot manage
what you do not measure
Every organization already carries the cost of workplace stress. Very few can see it as a line item, which is why it never gets managed like one. Here is what that cost is made of, what the published evidence says about moving it, and how to run the arithmetic on your own numbers.
We help organizations reduce preventable turnover by showing them which cohorts are carrying sustained strain months before anyone resigns.
Where the money actually leaks
Each of these is already in your P&L. None of them are labeled.
Preventable turnover
Gallup puts the cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times their annual salary, and found that 52% of voluntarily exiting employees say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent their departure. Preventable means somebody could have seen it. Almost nobody does, because the signal is not being collected.
Presenteeism
Deloitte’s UK analysis of the £51 billion annual cost of poor mental health to employers found presenteeism, at roughly £24 billion, to be the largest single component. This is the cost that never shows up in an absence report: people present, paid in full, working at a fraction of their capacity.
Friction between people
Benefits spend you cannot attribute
The EAP renews, the utilization report says 4%, the satisfaction score is fine, and nobody can say what changed. Research in the Journal of Insurance Regulation found utilization typically below 10%, with only 19% of employers reporting rates above 8%. You are buying coverage for the whole population and getting evidence about a sliver of it.
Prevention returns more than rescue
That is the whole argument for a preventative platform. Crisis support is necessary and expensive, and by the time it is used the presenteeism, the disengagement and often the resignation have already happened. Moving spending earlier in the curve is where the published returns are strongest.
Gallup adds the other half: at least 70% of the variance in team engagement traces back to the manager. Improving how a relatively small number of people read, write and respond under pressure is a disproportionately cheap lever on a very expensive number.
Average return per £1 employers spend supporting workforce mental health.
Deloitte UK, May 2024
Of voluntary leavers say their departure was preventable.
Gallup, 2019
Of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager.
Beck and Harter, Gallup, 2015
Typical EAP utilization, so most of your population is unmeasured.
Journal of Insurance Regulation, 2020
What retention has to change for this to pay for itself
This calculator makes no claim about how much SPARKS will reduce your turnover. It answers a narrower and more useful question: how small a change would have to be real before the program has paid for itself.
Assumptions: the replacement cost multiple and the 52% preventable share come from Gallup's 2019 analysis; headcount, salary, attrition and price are yours. Pricing follows the published tiers and fills itself in from your headcount, so type over it if you have been quoted something else. Nothing here is a forecast of SPARKS performance. It is a break-even threshold, so you can judge whether the bet is a reasonable one.
What to hold us to
A preventative program is only worth buying if you agreed in advance how you would know it worked. Here is the set we recommend fixing at kickoff.
| Measure | Where it comes from | First read | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aggregate stress and sentiment | SPARKS assessments, anonymized to cohort level | End of month 1 (baseline) | A trend line you can act on, and movement against industry benchmark |
| Cohort hot spots | Organizational dashboard, k‐anonymity protected | Quarter 1 | Pressure identified in a specific function or location before attrition confirms it |
| Voluntary attrition | Your HRIS | Quarter 2 onward | Movement in the cohorts the dashboard flagged, against the ones it did not |
| Program attribution | Dashboard, before and after each intervention | Each quarter | An answer at renewal that is not a utilization percentage |
| Participation | SPARKS adoption reporting | Week 2 onward | Materially above typical EAP utilization, because participation is private |
| Communication skill | Communications Coach usage patterns, aggregated | Quarter 2 | Declining reliance on coaching over time, which is the intended outcome |
Bring your numbers, we will bring the model
Thirty minutes with your headcount, attrition and current wellness spend is usually enough to see whether this is worth a pilot.
Sources
- Gallup, This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion, 2019.
- Deloitte UK, Poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year, 17 May 2024.
- SHRM, The Cost of Incivility, Q4 2024 Civility Index, 18 December 2024.
- Grammarly and The Harris Poll, The State of Business Communication, February 2023.
- C. D. Brooks and J. Ling, “An Evaluation of the Utilization of Employee Assistance Programs,” Journal of Insurance Regulation, vol. 39, no. 8, NAIC, 2020.
- R. Beck and J. Harter, Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement, Gallup, 2015.