What are the conversations your managers are avoiding costing you?
The pay conversation that never happens. The underperformance that drifts for two quarters. Move the sliders to your organisation — the estimate updates as you go. Conservative UK benchmarks, all adjustable, sources below.
Your organisation
per year, for an organisation your size — using conservative UK benchmarks you can check below
- Replacing people you could have kept£0Replacement ≈ 75% of salary; assumes a better conversation could have changed the outcome for half of them.
- Unresolved conflict & friction drag£0≈ £1,000 per employee per year — ACAS / Sheffield University estimate of what workplace conflict costs UK employers.
- Grievance & tribunal risk exposure£01% grievance rate; ~£40k per escalated case. Expected exposure, not a bill you’ll definitely receive.
- Development that doesn’t stick£0Around half of one-off training washes out without follow-up practice.
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Where these numbers come from
Deliberately conservative defaults, sense-checked with HR and People leaders. Your real numbers may be higher — they’re rarely lower.
Replacement cost — 75% of salary
Published estimates for replacing an employee range from 50% to 200% of salary once you count recruitment, onboarding, lost output and the team carrying the gap. We use 75% — the cautious end — and assume a better conversation (a stay conversation, a pay conversation handled well, underperformance addressed early) could have changed the outcome for only half of your regretted leavers.
Conflict drag — £1,000 per employee per year
ACAS and Sheffield University estimated workplace conflict costs UK employers £28.5bn a year — roughly £1,000 per employee. Most of it isn’t tribunals; it’s managers avoiding issues, people working around each other, and the productivity that quietly leaks out.
Grievance & tribunal exposure — 1% × ~£40k
We assume a 1% formal grievance rate (many HR leaders tell us that’s low) and ~£40,000 per escalated case: settlement payments in the region of £30k plus £8–12k in fees, before legal costs and management time. Multiplying the two gives an expected annual exposure — an insurance calculation, not an invoice.
Training wash-out — 50%
Research on training transfer consistently shows most one-off training fades without follow-up practice — some studies put the loss much higher than half. The fix isn’t more courses; it’s somewhere managers can actually practise between them. Training assessments show you whether yours stuck.
What we deliberately left out
Lost productivity from disengaged teams, stress-related absence, and the delivery impact of a struggling team. All real, all hard to put a defensible number on — so the total above is an underestimate by design.