The Situation

A national multifamily property management firm had a problem it had stopped trying to solve. In its 100-person corporate accounting department, annual turnover ranged from 50% to 70% year after year. The costs of recruiting, retraining, lost productivity, and client disruption were enormous, but leadership had reframed the problem as a law of nature. As the Senior Vice President of Finance put it: “We train them here, and then they move on to get their real job somewhere else.”

New hires took up to six months to become fully productive. Many left within weeks of starting. Training was informal and inconsistent — whoever had time taught whatever they remembered. The department was, in effect, running a perpetual recruiting operation with an attached accounting function.

The Diagnosis

William Rawe was brought in to address the turnover and reached a different conclusion than the one leadership had settled on: this was not a talent-market problem. It was a design problem — and design problems have solutions.
 

The employee experience told the real story. New hires arrived to no structured onboarding, unclear expectations, no visible path forward, and supervisors who managed workflows rather than people. Employees didn’t leave because the labor market pulled them out. They left because nothing in their first months gave them a reason to stay.
 

With turnover costs at $18,000 per employee, this problem cost the organization over $1 million annually.

 

The Intervention

The redesign focused on three things, in order: build competence, build connection, build confidence.

A five-day structured onboarding program. New employees walked through the entire monthly accounting cycle in a dedicated training space, away from the noise of the floor — learning the actual work end-to-end before being asked to perform it under pressure.
 

A structured development pathway. Clear expectations, defined promotion criteria, and online coursework housed in a learning management system allowed employees to see their future and supervisors to support progress without micromanaging.
 

Deliberate transfer of belonging. Daily check-ins with new hires at first, then a gradual, intentional handoff of that support to direct supervisors and peers. The goal was never dependence on a program — it was the kind of connection that keeps people coming back.
 

The Results
 

Within 18 months, annual turnover fell from 70% to 3% in a department that had treated 60% as inevitable. Time-to-productivity dropped from six months to two or three. Client satisfaction improved. Training became something employees could count on rather than something that happened to them. The savings from reduced recruiting, retraining, and disruption ran into millions.

The Epilogue — and Why It Matters More Than the Results
 

Two years after the architect of the program moved on, turnover had climbed back to 72%.

The systems were all still there: the onboarding program, the development pathways, the LMS. What had never changed was leadership. The department’s managers had tolerated the new approach — even benefited from it — but they had never internalized what made it work. They remained focused on tasks and workflows rather than people. When the person who carried the philosophy left, the philosophy left with him, and the systems were hollowed out within months.
 

That collapse taught a lesson no successful program could have:

Systems don’t retain people. Leaders do.

No onboarding program, development framework, or technology platform will outlast a culture in which leaders don’t connect with and develop their people. This is why every William C. Rawe Consulting engagement addresses both layers — the program design and the leaders who must carry it — and why sustainability and governance are built into the work from day one, not assumed afterward.

This experience became the foundation of Dr. Rawe’s doctoral research and his book, Leading with Impact.

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Is your organization paying for turnover it has learned to live with?