Programs · Diagnose
The Burnout & Retention Audit is a three-to-four-week diagnostic: an anonymous survey plus confidential listening sessions across your teams, synthesized into a findings-and-priorities report — presented to your leadership in the room, not attached to an email.
In short
The Burnout & Retention Audit is a 3-4 week diagnostic for companies that want to know where they're at risk of losing good people to burnout, and why. It combines an anonymous survey with confidential listening sessions, and ends with a full-day Findings Session where your leadership team builds its own 90-day plan. It starts at $8,500 and scales with the size of your company.
Length
3–4 weeks
Format
Survey + listening sessions + full-day Findings Session
Company size
Any — scope scales
Sponsor
CEO · GM · VP HR or Ops
Investment
from $8,500
Why an audit
Your most reliable people don't complain on their way down. They go quiet. And quiet reads as fine — right up until the recruiter calls.
Burned-out high performers rarely raise their hand — they have options, and they use them. The people you'd least expect to leave are often the ones carrying the most invisible load.
By the time someone is explaining why they left, you're paying one-half to two times their salary to replace them — Gallup's conservative estimate. And the exit is the smaller expense: research in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2025) finds roughly 89% of the burnout bill is presenteeism — people still at their desks, running at 40–60% of capacity. The audit is the physical you run while intervention is still cheap.
A hallway hunch doesn't move a budget. A team-by-team risk picture with priorities attached does. The audit turns "I think we might have a problem" into a plan your CFO can read.
How it works
A kickoff session with your sponsor defines scope and the team segments that matter. Then an anonymous survey — ten to twelve minutes, built on a research-grade burnout instrument (the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory) and tuned to your organization's language, not generic wellness questions — goes to everyone in scope, with a participation push so the data means something.
Forty-five-minute confidential conversations — one-on-one and small-group — sampled across levels and functions. This is where the audit earns its price: people tell an outside listener under explicit confidentiality what they will never type into an internal survey. Faye spent 18 years running voice-of-customer interviews in technical industry; this is that craft, turned inward on your organization.
Survey data and session themes are triangulated into a burnout-risk picture, team by team, across the four causes that actually drive it: workload design, priority clarity, recovery norms, and whether managers are reading early signals.
A full day with your leadership team, in the room, not a PDF in your inbox. The morning is the findings: retention-risk hot spots, team by team, and what is driving them. The afternoon is the work of turning them into a prioritized 90-day action plan your team chose, ranked by effort and impact — plus an honest recommendation on what to do next, which is sometimes "nothing more than this." The audit ends when that plan is handed to you.
What you get
The audit is deliberately designed to stand alone — worth buying even if you never buy anything else from us. The recommendations are yours to run with, with us or without us. And if the findings say your system is healthier than you feared, that is exactly what the report will say.
Activate · the 90-day implementation
Most 90-day plans decay on contact with the quarter. Activate is the same audit and Findings Session, plus six bi-weekly sessions across the ninety days that follow, where Faye leads your leadership team through executing the plan: what moved, what stalled, what to kill next, and a day-90 reread of the signals to see whether the numbers followed.
Length
12–16 weeks, start to day-90 reread
Includes
Full audit · Findings Session · six execution sessions
Rhythm
Every two weeks, 90 minutes, your leadership team
Investment
$14,000
Full details at /programs/activate/. Buy Diagnose alone if your team will run the plan themselves. Buy Activate if you want the outside person in the room every two weeks who keeps the hard thing from being quietly dropped. Either way, a Detect fee paid within the last 90 days comes off the price.
The entire value of the audit rests on people believing their honesty can't come back to bite them. So the protections aren't fine print; they're the method:
Fit
Questions
Purpose and endpoint. An engagement survey measures a broad climate once a year and typically ends in a dashboard. The audit is purpose-built for one question — where are you at risk of losing good people to exhaustion, and why — and it ends in a prioritized plan presented to your leadership. The listening sessions are the bigger difference: rating scales can't tell you why a team is running hot, and people won't type the real answer into an internal tool. They will say it out loud to an outside listener under confidentiality.
Ten to twelve minutes for anyone taking the survey. Forty-five minutes for those invited to a listening session. Your sponsor spends roughly three hours across the engagement: kickoff, a mid-point check, and the leadership briefing.
Yes. Scope scales with the organization — a 40-person company and a 400-person division get different sampling plans, not different rigor. Listening sessions run on-site or by video, so multi-site and remote teams are fine. Pricing starts at $8,500 and scales with size and the number of segments you want read separately.
That's what the design is for: an external interviewer, explicit confidentiality, no reporting on groups under five, and nothing attributable. People are consistently more candid with a confidential outsider than in any internal channel — it's the reason the listening sessions exist at all. Honesty also rises when leadership announces the audit as "help us fix the system," not "help us find problems people."
Whatever the findings warrant. The 90-day plan is yours to execute — with us or without us. If you want it led, Activate adds six bi-weekly execution sessions across the ninety days. When the findings point to leadership capability gaps, the natural next step is the Sustainable Leader Program (to build the fix). But the audit is not a sales funnel with a report attached; if the right answer is "run these three changes yourselves and call us if it doesn't move," that's the recommendation you'll get.
Yes — Detect, the two-week burnout read. Same survey instrument and four-cause framework, without the listening sessions or the 90-day plan: one read, a 60-minute executive readout, $2,500 fixed. If it says the deeper work is warranted, the full fee credits toward the audit or Activate, started within 90 days.
Only Brightwork. Your organization receives the synthesized report — themes, aggregated results, de-identified quotes. Raw survey responses and session notes never leave our side, and we're glad to put the data-handling terms in the agreement.
Where it leads
The same audit and Findings Session, then six bi-weekly sessions where Faye leads your leadership team through running the plan. $14,000.
Activate details →The 12-week cohort where your people-leaders build the workload redesign, kill-list, and recovery norms the findings call for — and present the plan to you.
Flagship details →Before you decide
Article
What each instrument measures, why a strong engagement score can hide high burnout risk, and when to use which.
Article
Where to look when your most dependable people stop telling you, and why “no complaints” is one of the signs.
Next step
Thirty minutes. Tell us what you're seeing — or just what you're worried you're not seeing. We'll tell you honestly whether an audit is the right move, what it would cover, and what it would cost for your size.