What We Cannot Verify
This site tells readers to check who produced a figure. The same question turned inward produces a list rather than a disclaimer. For a related reference, see ways time trackers can be manipulated.
The seven
How much of this generalises. Most workforce research is conducted in large US organisations, and a team of nine in another country may work differently in ways nobody has measured.
Whether the vendor figures are right. The four-times manager effect, the aggregate cost estimates, most monitoring statistics — sourced from companies selling manager development, engagement platforms and monitoring software. Labelled at every use, and not verified.
Causation. Turnover clustering under a manager is a correlation. The manager may be the cause, or may have been given an impossible team.
Whether our diagnoses are complete. The causes listed on each page are the ones that recur in published research and practice, not an exhaustive set.
What is happening in your organisation. Every practical page here ends in a measurement you run precisely because we cannot know this.
Whether the current numbers hold. Labour markets move. A retention figure from a low-hire economy describes that economy.
And which of these pages will be wrong in five years — the ones tied to current market conditions rather than to how people work.
What is stronger than the rest
One source on this site is peer-reviewed: the Stanford hybrid-work study published in Nature. It is cited repeatedly because there is little else of that standard in this field, and the repetition is deliberate rather than lazy.
Professional body figures — the SHRM replacement cost range — come next, because a membership of practitioners constrains what can be said.
Everything else is survey data or vendor research, and is marked.
What is offered instead of certainty
Source types in the sentence, not on a method page nobody reads.
Measurements you run on your own data, which require nothing from us and answer the question that matters.
And the arithmetic shown, so you can substitute your own figures rather than accept ours.
The archive
This domain previously published 115 articles across unrelated subjects, produced rapidly and retained by the owner's decision. They are not part of the material described above and carry their own dating.
They are not represented as research, and nothing on the pages here draws on them.
The correction we want
Numbers from an actual organisation. What you measured, over what period, what changed.
Particularly where it contradicts a page here. Almost nobody publishes theirs, which is why this field runs on vendor statistics in the first place.
The short version
- Seven limits: generalisability, unverified vendor figures, causation, completeness of diagnoses, your specific situation, current market conditions, and which pages will age
- Vendor figures are labelled at every use and not verified — they come from companies selling manager development, engagement platforms and monitoring software
- One source here is peer-reviewed, and it is cited repeatedly because little else in this field meets that standard
- Offered instead: source types in the sentence, measurements you run yourself, and arithmetic shown so you can substitute your own numbers
- The 115 archived articles from this domain's previous use are dated separately and nothing here draws on them
- The correction most wanted is numbers from a real organisation, especially where they contradict a page here
For additional context on this topic, see IGN.