Turns out, it was the schedule
We're losing warehouse people fast. CFO wants to push a big raise through, but something feels off about it. Can we talk before I sign off? Email from the client · six days before we started
avoided before the raise was ever signed off
What the work looked like
The exit interviews kept pointing at pay, and the CFO had already priced out a 9% raise across warehouse operations worth about $900,000 a year. The exec team was six days from signing off when the call came in, and the CEO had a gut read that something else was going on. She wanted a second opinion before committing.
LSPT pulled the warehouse turnover history and started looking at the pattern of who was actually leaving, when, and from which shift assignments. When we combined the behavior with what people had said in exit interviews, the two stories didn't quite match. What people said was pay, but what the timing said was that the earliest leavers were the ones whose schedules were getting scrambled in the first thirty days.
The data had more than one layer to read, and each layer told us something the exit interviews couldn't. The timestamps on every exit told us when people were actually walking out, and their shift assignments told us which patterns were losing the most people. The manager-to-new-hire ratio during each cohort's first month told us how much onboarding support those workers were actually getting. When we layered all of that together, the pattern pointed at a narrow window: the first thirty days, inside three specific schedule patterns that rotated new hires across all three shifts.
Our recommendation was to hold pay flat, give every new hire a single consistent schedule for their first sixty days, and assign a 30-day anchor manager to each cohort. Two quarters after the rollout, warehouse attrition had dropped from 34% to 16%.
Warehouse attrition rate
The LSPT difference
While most HR reads stop at the exit interview, LSPT works to understand what the behavior underneath is actually telling us. We don't sit outside the operating team writing recommendations from a distance. HR and operations are the same seat at LSPT, and the data that moves one moves the other.
That's what made this case work. If HR had read the exit interviews alone and the CFO had signed off on the raise, the company would have committed $900,000 a year to the wrong lever, and the exit curves would have kept sloping the same direction. Merging the HR read with the operations read caught the problem before it cost anything.