People & Leadership · Human Resource Management

Engage to Win — Liffey Connect's Return on People

A four-round, intermediate people-leadership simulation set inside Liffey Connect Group, a Dublin customer-operations company (2,100 staff across Dublin, Cork, Galway and Leeds, EUR 145M revenue, a thin 8% operating margin of EUR 11.6M, payroll ≈62% of cost).

4 rounds MBA & Masters English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A four-round, intermediate people-leadership simulation set inside Liffey Connect Group, a Dublin customer-operations company (2,100 staff across Dublin, Cork, Galway and Leeds, EUR 145M revenue, a thin 8% operating margin of EUR 11.6M, payroll ≈62% of cost).

On 12 January 2026 a major insurer client — 22% of revenue (EUR 32M), renewing in 150 days, ~310 roles at stake — puts Liffey Connect on formal service watch after CSAT fell from 84% to 71% and attrition on its dedicated team hit 41% annualized, naming "workforce stability and engagement" as a renewal condition.

The group engagement score has slumped from 74 to 58 (bottom-quartile teams at 44), voluntary attrition runs at 34%/year vs a ~25% benchmark at EUR 9,500 fully-loaded replacement cost per leaver (~EUR 6.8M/year walking out), and the celebrated employer-sponsored volunteering programme that won "Employer of the Year" in 2021 has collapsed from 48% to 23% participation.

The board approves a one-off EUR 1.8M people-investment fund plus EUR 600,000/year recurring — but will only release the recurring tranche against a measurement plan that proves ROI.

Playing the senior people-leadership team you (1) diagnose disengagement past the headline score to its highest-leverage driver and the segment where intervention moves the renewal-relevant metrics — the data shows engagement varies more BETWEEN managers than between sites; (2) allocate the EUR 1.8M fund across manager-capability, volunteering relaunch, job-redesign/autonomy, recognition, targeted pay for the flight-risk team and wellbeing — where concentrating spend on the causal lever beats spreading thin; (3) design a measurement plan that separates leading indicators (engagement pulse, volunteering participation, manager-behaviour ratings) from lagging business outcomes (attrition, CSAT, renewal), with a baseline, a phased-rollout comparison and a defensible avoided-attrition ROI — vanity activity metrics are penalized; and (4) defend the plan to a CFO challenging the ROI and an insurer procurement lead demanding evidence of workforce stability, reconciling Shantz's responsible-leadership story (purpose, meaningfulness, community) with the hard commercial case.

The math rewards a concentrated, manager-led, well-measured plan that fixes pay and workload on the at-risk team and keeps the purpose narrative — and punishes the five classic errors: funding everything equally (no measurable signal), leaning on volunteering while ignoring pay/workload, building activity-metric dashboards, claiming ROI with no baseline or control, and stripping the responsible-leadership story down to pure cost-cutting.

Final KPIs track Engagement, At-Risk-Team Attrition, Account CSAT and Renewal Confidence.

Who it is for

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Name the single highest-leverage driver of disengagement.
  • Where do you target the intervention to move the renewal-relevant metrics?
  • How confident are you that disengagement CAUSED the attrition and CSAT decline (not just coincided)? (%)
  • Allocate the EUR 1.8M one-off fund across the intervention menu (must total €1.80M).
  • Choose your primary LEADING indicator — the early signal the plan is working.
  • How do you establish causality — that it was YOUR plan, not the labour market?
  • State the ROI logic the CFO will accept.
  • Time horizon you tell the board to expect lagging-metric impact (months)
  • The single headline metric you stake your credibility on.
  • How do you reconcile the responsible-leadership story with the commercial case?

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Engagement, Attrition & Renewal Trajectory

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Human Resource Management.

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