For years, frontline employers have accepted high turnover as part of the job. The logic is familiar: the work is demanding, people cycle through it, and the best you can do is hire fast enough to cover the gaps. Low engagement, constant churn, a problem too broad and too persistent to solve.
Our latest research challenges the assumption that high turnover is just the nature of frontline work. In partnership with goHappy, we compared more than 50,000 frontline survey responses from goHappy’s platform against an independent Lighthouse Research study of 2,000 U.S. frontline workers, both fielded in the last year. The comparison points to something specific: what separates the organizations that retain frontline workers from those stuck in the churn cycle is a handful of everyday leadership behaviors. These behaviors can be measured. Where employers strengthened them over the past year, turnover dropped in step.
The engagement gap, then, isn’t a fixed condition of frontline work. It reflects how frontline teams are led, which means leaders can change it.
Half the frontline shows up disconnected
Start with the market baseline. Across the broader frontline workforce, 57% of workers count as engaged. If you flip that around: the remaining 43% show up without a real connection to the work, the team, or the company. They do the job, but they aren’t invested in it.
That disconnection carries a cost. Disengaged workers quit sooner, which means more open shifts, more recruiting and training, and more strain on the people who stay. It reaches the customer too in slower service, more mistakes, and less of the discretionary effort that will generally earn repeat business. There’s a productivity cost as well: business units in the bottom quartile of engagement run 18% less productive than those at the top. For frontline operators, where labor is often the largest controllable cost, that gap gets expensive fast.
This isn’t a new problem, and it isn’t a motivation problem. Frontline workers sit closer to the customer, absorb more operational pressure, and hear from their managers less often than corporate teams do. They tend to have fewer resources, and updates from the company reach them less reliably. Put those conditions together and the same symptoms surface every time: turnover, inconsistency, quality slips, safety risk.
Engagement usually breaks down in a few specific places: feedback that’s inconsistent or missing, coaching that’s reactive when it happens at all, recognition that’s rare, and manager communication that’s irregular and unpredictable. None of these is dramatic on its own. Together, they describe the daily experience of most frontline workers, and they explain why so many keep one foot out the door.
Of all these gaps, appreciation has the strongest link to how workers feel. Employees who feel accepted, respected, and appreciated are five times more likely to say their wellbeing has improved. That’s a different experience of work altogether. Yet fewer than half of frontline workers feel appreciated on a regular basis. Appreciation costs nothing and needs no new program, it can be as simple as a manager noticing good work and saying so, or remembering what a person is dealing with at home. That it’s missing for half the workforce shows how easily the basics slip under operational pressure.
What separates the retention leaders
The organizations in goHappy’s dataset share an approach. They survey their frontline teams often, get the results to managers quickly, and expect those managers to act on them. The platform supports that loop, frequent surveys, fast results, data a manager can use the same week instead of waiting on an annual report.
The effect is consistency. Inside these companies, coaching, recognition, and communication become routine, because the managers doing that work get both the data and the prompt to keep at it. That consistency opens a gap with the broader market, and it’s widest in the behaviors a manager controls day to day:
- Coaching: 77.0% favorable among goHappy customers, against 32.6% in the broader market
- Appreciation: 77.9% against 40.0%
- Manager–employee connection: 79.8% against 45.2%
The same gap shows up in the headline measures:
- Employee engagement: 72.2% favorable, against 57.0% in the market
- Leader actions: 77.8% against 43.9%
And these organizations keep improving. Over the past year, their engagement rose 8.5 points across the platform’s model, every dimension it tracks, from coaching to appreciation to communication, moved up, and none declined.
When engagement rises, turnover falls
When engagement improves, retention follows. Among goHappy customers, turnover dropped from 99.0% to 89.1% in a single year. Engagement rose over the same period, the two moved together, and that’s the pattern across the data: as people feel more coached, appreciated, and informed, fewer of them leave.
The drop was largest among non-managers, the hourly workers who make up most of the frontline. Their turnover fell from 103.3% to 86.4%, a 16.9-point improvement. That group is usually the hardest to retain, so the size of the shift matters. When the people doing the core work stay longer, the operation runs with fewer gaps, less retraining, and more continuity.
Snooze, an A.M. Eatery, is a breakfast and brunch chain that opened in Denver in 2006 and now runs on a frontline workforce of hourly servers, cooks, and shift managers. It shows the pattern at full strength: engagement above 75% and turnover below 80%, lower than even the benchmark for the highest-engagement employers, in an industry where turnover routinely tops 100%. Snooze doesn’t run different engagement programs than its competitors. Its managers just use them consistently, day in and day out, instead of letting them lapse.
Lower turnover saves money directly. Replacing a frontline worker costs one-third to one-half of their annual salary. For an employer with thousands of hourly staff, cutting turnover by ten points adds up quickly and that’s before counting the productivity lost while roles sit open and new hires get up to speed.
It comes down to how managers show up
Across the data, we see that what separates a high-engagement team from a low one is rarely the program itself. It’s whether the manager runs it with real attention, coaching people, recognizing them, and taking an interest in them as individuals.
Jeremy Edmonds, EVP of People and Culture at Snooze, saw this directly when he compared two of the group’s restaurants, one with high engagement, one with low. Both used the same tools and ran the same programs. In the high-scoring restaurant, managers were invested in their teams: developing people, connecting them to the company’s mission. In the other, managers worked the same checklist mechanically. It was the same system, but with completely different results.
Snooze went and asked employees what their manager does that shows they care. None of the answers were about pay: “They say good morning to me every single morning and ask how I’m doing.” “They know the names of my three kids.” “They knew when my dog died and gave me flowers.” Those moments are what people mean by feeling supported.
Our study backs this up. A worker who doesn’t feel their manager knows them as a person has virtually no chance of feeling supported by that manager. Care comes first. Without it, coaching and recognition fall flat.
A playbook for managers and the people who support them
For HR and operations leaders trying to turn this into action, the data points to five practices that consistently separate higher-performing frontline teams from the rest. They aren’t complicated, but they do require consistency.
Start with coaching. If a manager can only build one new habit, regular feedback is the one with the most impact. It does two jobs at once: it improves performance, and it answers the complaint buried in the lowest engagement scores, I don’t know what’s expected of me. Workers who get regular feedback are 50% more likely to understand their job expectations. From there:
- Make feedback a habit. Frequent, specific feedback beats the annual review. One useful rule of thumb: pair every piece of corrective feedback with several pieces of reinforcing feedback, so coaching doesn’t only show up when something goes wrong.
- Prioritize the non-manager experience. That’s where the biggest engagement gains and the steepest turnover drops live.
- Be transparent, consistently. Workers who see their employer as opaque are 9x more likely to call the culture dysfunctional.
- Communicate proactively. Workers with a communicative supervisor are 2.4x more likely to feel supported.
- Design for flexibility. On the frontline, that means some control over when you work and how you do it. Workers with flexible schedules are 2.6x more likely to plan to stay.
Meet people where they actually are
One caveat: these practices all assume you can reach people, and frontline workers aren’t at a desk to be reached easily. They’re on the floor, on their feet, moving through a shift, not checking email between tasks. Engagement tools built for office workers miss them by design.
That’s the case for mobile-first, SMS-based communication: it reaches people in the flow of work, and also shortens the loop for managers. Traditionally, a manager might learn how their team feels once a year, long after they could do anything about it. When that feedback arrives in something close to real time, the picture changes. A manager can see a problem forming and respond to it the same week, while the situation is still fresh and the fix still matters. Smaller, faster adjustments are possible in this scenario.
Two years of data give us one clear direction
The findings in this study draw on two consecutive years of goHappy engagement data, more than 46,000 responses in 2024 and nearly 53,000 in 2025, alongside our Lighthouse Research study of the broader frontline market. That scale shows movement and read together, the three sources tell a consistent story.
The overall takeaway for frontline employers is that turnover is more controllable than it’s traditionally been treated. The organizations getting better results are consistent on the fundamentals: managers who get to know their people, give feedback that’s specific and regular, and show up the same way whether or not a survey is running. High turnover was never just ‘part of the job.’ It’s a gap and the employers in this data are proof it can close.
Read the full findings on frontline engagement and retention in the State of the Frontline Worker report
Roberta Gogos is an HR Industry Go-to-market Leader and Analyst. She has been behind the scenes at market-leading companies to help them shift market narrative, influence buyer behavior and expand into new markets. She is known for her ability to turn strategic vision into measurable execution through positioning, storytelling, and operational rigor.
Since 2024, Roberta has been focused on industry research used by investors, corporate leaders, and vendors to assess technologies and inform M&A decisions, improve GTM, enable sales, inform product development, and develop thought leadership.
She has 20 years of experience in marketing, positioning, and strategy, with 10+ years of that being directly related to talent and the workforce.
