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Team Building9 min read

Engineering Culture Economics: The ROI of Team Health

Companies with high engineering culture scores have 2.5x lower attrition and 40% higher velocity.

By Richard Ewing·

Culture as Economics

High-culture teams: 2.5x lower attrition (saving $200-400K per prevented departure), 40% higher velocity (more features per dollar), 60% fewer incidents (lower reliability cost), 3x better candidate referral rate (lower recruiting cost).

Culture investments with highest ROI: psychological safety training ($5K, prevents $500K in attrition), blameless postmortems (free, reduces incident recurrence 40%), dedicated learning time (10-20% time, improves retention 30%), clear career ladders (reduces attrition 25%).

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.