THE MATH BEHIND THE NUMBER
Where $30K comes from
Research from Gallup, McKinsey, and Harvard Business Review shows companies lose 15–20% of payroll to misalignment, blind spots, and unclear roles.
SKOR's own data confirms it, $30K per employee is conservative.
THE BREAKDOWN
Three places profit leaks from your teams.
$30K isn't one cost. It's the combined impact of three categories that compound silently across every team in your organization.
$18K
PER EMPLOYEE / YEAR
Productivity Loss
Disengaged employees cost 18% of their annual salary in lost productivity. At $100K average compensation, that's $18K per person, in slower output, missed deadlines, and effort that goes nowhere.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace
$8K
PER EMPLOYEE / YEAR
Preventable Turnover
Replacing an employee costs 50–200% of their salary. Low accountability teams see 37% higher turnover. Spread across your team, even modest preventable attrition adds $8K+ per head annually.
Source: SHRM, Gallup
$4K
PER EMPLOYEE / YEAR
Misalignment &
Blind Spots
When leaders rate feedback at 8.5 and teams rate it at 4.7, that gap isn't just a perception problem, it's profit walking out the door. Unclear priorities, avoided conflict, and unrecognized work compound daily.
Source: McKinsey, SKOR assessment data
$18K
+
productivity loss
$8K
+
preventable turnover
$4K
=
misalignment cost
$30K
per employee, per year
AT SCALE
What $30K looks like across your company.
These aren't theoretical numbers. They're what's quietly disappearing from your P&L.
$1.5M
50 People
Bigger than most companies' marketing budgets. Leaking through blind spots instead.
$7.5M
250 People
That's a new product line, a market expansion, or an acquisition gone every year.
$15M
500 People
Enough to move the stock price. Enough to change a company's trajectory.
$30M
1000 People
At this scale, the profit leak is a line item nobody's accounting for. Until now.
SKOR'S OWN DATA
We don't just cite the research.
We validate it.
Every SKOR assessment calculates a Profit Leak Number based on real team data — not industry averages.
3.8
avg. leader vs. team perception gap
Across SKOR assessments, leaders consistently rate team performance 3.8 points higher than their teams do on the same questions. That gap represents real profit leaking through misalignment, unclear expectations, and blind spots nobody's talking about.
When SKOR calculates the dollar impact of these gaps across 7 performance muscles, the average comes to $30K+ per employee, confirming what the independent research has been publishing for years.
THE RESEARCH
Where the data comes from.
Gallop
Disengaged employees cost 18–34% of their annual salary. Global cost of disengagement: $8.8 trillion per year. Low-engagement teams see 37% higher absenteeism and up to 43% higher turnover
McKinsey & Company
Teams with unclear roles and misaligned priorities lose 20–30% of productive capacity. Active alignment management recovers significant output without adding headcount.
Harvard Business Review
Highly engaged teams see 23% higher profitability and 18% higher productivity. The engagement gap is one of the strongest predictors of financial performance.
SHRM
Replacing an employee costs 50–200% of annual salary depending on role level. Voluntary turnover is significantly higher in teams with low recognition and unclear expectations.