REDW Cuts Regrettable Turnover and Boosts Engagement by Turning Culture Into a Leadership Discipline
Location: Albuquerque, NM
Industry: Certified Public Accountants & Consultants
Team Members: 150-499
Measurable results
- 28% drop in regrettable turnover
- 9-point boost in team member engagement
- 11% growth in learning and growth opportunities
- 40+ Top Workplaces employer recognition awards
Executive takeaways
- Measurement reduced risk. REDW identified engagement and turnover issues before they became losses.
- People Operations became a strategic force. Team member feedback data reshaped leadership behavior and decision-making.
- Culture turned into leverage. Engagement, retention, and employer brand all moved together — with proof to back it up.
REDW didn’t just improve culture. They made it measurable, actionable, and impossible for the market to ignore.
REDW at a Glance
REDW is a professional services firm grounded in a clear purpose: to make meaningful contributions in the lives of their team members, clients, and communities. Values aren’t aspirational at REDW. They’re operational. They shape decisions, leadership expectations, and even which clients the firm chooses to serve. That belief set the bar. But it also raised the stakes. In 2019, Managing Principal Steve Cogan decided that if culture and team member experience were truly going to be a strategic advantage, REDW leadership needed a more rigorous and trusted way to understand it, shape it, and tell its story.
The Challenge: Without visibility, engagement and turnover risk went unseen
REDW has always believed that culture could be a competitive advantage. And a few years ago, leadership recognized a gap between belief and execution getting in the way:
- Feedback was fragmented.
- Measurement was inconsistent.
- Data lacked credibility and context.
Leaders cared deeply, but they didn’t have a shared, trusted way to understand what team members were actually experiencing day to day.
As Katherine Bastow, Vice President of People Operations, put it: “In order to set a compass, we needed a benchmark — where are we at?”
Without that benchmark, the threats were real:
- Hidden engagement risks would surface through attrition, increasing costs and disruption.
- Regrettable losses would inflate recruiting spend and slow execution.
- Assumption-based people decisions would increase mis-hires and productivity loss.
- People Operations’ ability to manage team member risk, growth, and performance would be limited.
Strategy: Measure, Shape, Showcase
REDW made a deliberate decision to treat culture like a business system — not just a sentiment.
1. Measure: Creating a source of truth leaders could trust
REDW chose the Energage Workplace Survey to replace ad hoc surveys and establish a credible baseline for the team member experience across the company. The goal wasn’t more data. It was better data — data leaders could trust enough to act on.
Katherine made it clear: “SurveyMonkey doesn’t give you data holistically.”
Now with a five-year data set, the Workplace Survey gives REDW leaders a shared view of engagement, trust, leadership effectiveness, and alignment — grounded in benchmarks they can believe in.
But REDW didn’t stop with an annual snapshot.
They layered in Pulse to maintain visibility throughout the year. The short, more frequent surveys followed up on specific insights to test whether action plans were working and measure progress in real time.
This moved static measurement to continuous listening. Leaders could see where sentiment was changing and course-correct quickly. Pulse surveys also reinforced trust. Team members saw that feedback led to action, not to silence. Katherine ties this directly to belief and trust: “If people are sharing, they believe there’s something happening.”
Combined, the Workplace Survey and Pulse created a disciplined measurement system — and for the first time, a shared compass.
2. Shape: Turning survey insights into leadership action
“We look at our survey results, especially as we’re trying to identify where we’re seeing the turnover … what tenure, what demographics.”
Sara Rolison,
People Operations Generalist
Using tools including Energage Insights and the Behavioral Assessment, REDW turned insights into action to shape its culture.
Insights from the Workplace Survey data became the tool to:
- Focus leadership attention where it matters most.
- Benchmark and grow team member sentiment.
- Prioritize actions based on patterns, not assumptions.
- Identify learning and development opportunities based on real data.
- Track progress and change year over year.
REDW uses the Energage Behavioral Assessment to make team member strengths visible and usable.
For Katherine, its key differentiator is integration: “If you use Wiley or some of those others, it’s not super clear how it transitions into the team member profile to home in on opportunity and strengths. The Behavioral Assessment does, so it was a no-brainer for us.”
In action, the Behavioral Assessment:
- Guides manager–team member communication and coaching.
- Informs performance reviews and ongoing feedback.
- Improves collaboration on cross-functional teams.
- Helps leaders coach to strengths, not assumptions.
With credible insight, team member feedback data stopped being a People Operations artifact. It was now a reliable tool for pinpointing where the team member experience was breaking down, where individual strengths could be applied. Leadership’s view of People Operations shifted, too. What was once a compliance function was now viewed as a strategic force. Katherine noticed the shift: “They started to come to me for advice and saw me as a partner.”
3. Showcase: Transforming culture into proof in the market
Once REDW had measured and shaped its culture, the focus shifted to telling that story — authentically and at scale. Employer Branding allows REDW to turn Workplace Survey insights into real, usable content. No slogans or marketing spin. Just real team member voices telling the story.
Katherine said the Employer Branding piece is critical:
“When the new marketing director came on, I said, ‘We have all the content — you’re not going to have to create it. It’s our team members telling the story … not a marketing strategy with made-up stuff by Marketing and People Operations. These are real team member voices.’”
Insights and anonymous comments from survey data became a unified message that REDW could use across the business:
- Recruiting campaigns and careers pages.
- Internal newsletters and culture pushes.
- Learning and development storytelling.
- Social media and employer branding content.
At the same time, Top Workplaces employer recognition provided trusted, third-party validation of that experience. The awards didn’t define REDW’s culture. They confirmed it. Together, Employer Branding and Top Workplaces amplified visibility, especially on social media. That validation reinforced what current team members were already building — and helped attract candidates who shared the same values, expectations, and commitment to the work.
The takeaway: REDW’s values-based, people-first culture was already there. Employer Branding made it visible — Top Workplaces made it credible. The result is a brand team members recognize, candidates trust, and the market validates.
The Impact: Culture became a competitive advantage
“I would question if things would have gone backwards if we hadn’t done anything.”
Katherine Bastow,
Vice President of People Operations
By closing the loop between measurement, action, and storytelling, REDW built real momentum:
- 28% drop in regrettable turnover
- 9-point boost in engagement
- 11% growth in learning and growth opportunities
- 40+ Top Workplaces employer recognition awards
REDW’s strategy proves that culture improves fastest when leaders can see it, shape it, and share it. By measuring what matters, acting on insight, and amplifying team member voices, REDW reduced risk, strengthened leadership, and delivered better results.
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