The turnover rate wasn't the signal. The timing was.

Context

This anonymized case concerns a customer-service team at client sites where holiday coverage was required. Many site employees worked away from their hometowns.

Visible problem

Holiday coverage carried no additional compensation. For many employees stationed away from home, holiday duty could mean losing one of their few opportunities each year to return home.

Signal

Three times in a row, employees resigned immediately before or after major holidays. Roughly 40–50% of employees resigning before a holiday asked whether they could complete their departure before it began.

Reframe

The repeated timing was a diagnostic clue: the customer-service team’s resignations clustered around holidays.

Diagnosis

Company-wide and team-level resignation patterns were compared, and exit interviews identified the missing variable: employees at some client sites were away from their hometowns while required holiday coverage carried no additional compensation.

Design

A full overtime proposal had previously been rejected because of cost. Using the production team’s RMB 50/day holiday-duty payment as an internal benchmark, the initial experimental benchmark was RMB 50/day for on-call duty and RMB 100/day for actively working.

Second-order consideration

Managers naturally assigned more holiday coverage to experienced employees because they could handle customer issues independently. A quarterly contribution award was proposed so that reliable employees would not effectively lose more for being reliable.

Implementation

A small compensation mechanism—not the previously rejected full overtime proposal—was launched under the author’s independent payroll authority with the department head and observed over the next two holiday periods.

Validation

Resignations were tracked across the next two holiday periods. The source reports that holiday-linked resignations fell substantially.

Institutionalization

Management subsequently approved a formal program. Its final policy specified RMB 200/day for actively working, RMB 100/day for on-call duty, and quarterly contribution awards of RMB 3,000, RMB 1,500, and RMB 1,000 for the top three contributors.

Reflection

Reflection principle: Do not let the people who can do more become the people who lose more.