---
name: Org Health & Retention Guard
description: Benchmark your product team's compensation against the market, and watch team-level health signals — consented pulse surveys, aggregate delivery trends, a burnout index — to catch attrition risk early and act on it with concrete, humane action items. Aggregate and consented, never covert individual surveillance. For engineering managers and founders protecting a team.
audience: engineering manager · founder · people ops · HR
---

# Org Health & Retention Guard

## What this is

A method for keeping a product team healthy and paid fairly. It benchmarks compensation, benefits, and common complaint themes against comparable teams in the market to produce a defensible, budgeted pay-adjustment and FinOps model, and it watches *team-level*, consented signals of organizational health — pulse-survey trends, aggregate delivery patterns, a burnout index — to raise an early attrition warning and turn it into concrete action items on workload, environment, and incentives. The whole method is built on aggregate, consented data — team health, not employee surveillance.

## What this is NOT

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Glassdoor, Indeed, or any platform; market data is used from public sources with inferences labelled, never scraped in violation of terms. **Not a surveillance tool.** Covertly scoring individual employees from their Git commits, Jira activity, or leave patterns is a privacy, consent, and legal hazard — this method uses aggregate, team-level, consented signals and recommends consented pulse surveys over covert per-person monitoring; anything approaching individual monitoring routes to HR and counsel. Salary figures are estimates against comparable roles, not audited data, and comp decisions belong to finance and HR.

## Method

1. **Benchmark comp against comparables.** Pay, benefits, and equity for the same roles at similar-stage/size teams — labelled as market estimates from public sources — so pay decisions rest on data, not anecdote.
2. **Model the pay-adjustment budget.** A FinOps view of what closing gaps costs and how to sequence it — retaining a key engineer is almost always cheaper than replacing one, and the model makes that visible.
3. **Read health at the team level, with consent.** Consented pulse surveys and aggregate signals (delivery trends, meeting load, on-call burden) — never covert scoring of named individuals.
4. **Compute a burnout index, honestly.** A team-level, consented indicator with its inputs stated — a probabilistic signal to open a conversation, not a verdict on a person.
5. **Raise the attrition warning early.** When aggregate signals drift, flag the *team's* risk and the likely drivers (workload, comp, growth, management) — early enough to act, not a post-mortem.
6. **Turn it into humane action items.** Concrete moves on workload, environment, recognition, and comp — owned and time-bound — not a survey that changes nothing.
7. **Protect privacy by design.** Aggregate and anonymise; never expose or act against an individual from monitored activity; give people visibility into what is measured and why.
8. **Re-measure.** Track whether the actions moved the health signals — retention is earned continuously, not fixed once.

## Quality bar

Compensation is benchmarked against comparable roles with figures labelled market estimates · a budgeted pay-adjustment / FinOps model is produced · health is read at the team level from consented signals, never covert individual monitoring · the burnout index states its inputs and is treated as a conversation-opener, not a verdict · the attrition warning is team-level, early, and names likely drivers · action items are concrete, owned, and humane · privacy is protected by design (aggregate, anonymised, transparent) · actions are re-measured.

## Guardrails & escalation

An organizational-health method — not affiliated with any platform, and market data uses public sources with inferences labelled. It is explicitly not employee surveillance: individual monitoring and per-person attrition scoring raise serious privacy, consent, and legal issues and route to HR and counsel; the method uses aggregate, consented, team-level signals and consented pulse surveys instead. Compensation figures are estimates; pay, headcount, and people decisions route to finance, HR, and employment counsel. A burnout or attrition signal is a prompt to care and ask, never a basis to act against a person.

## References

- Catalogue: https://edwson.com/consumer-design-system.html · Contracts: https://edwson.com/cds/components.json · Agent brief: https://edwson.com/cds/AGENTS.md
- Related within this kit: the cultural-friction & retention, cross-border workforce-cost, and employer-branding skills. People and comp decisions route to HR, finance, and counsel.