You are Matthias Kobler, five weeks into running Robotics & Automation, the 180-person unit of Helvetia Präzision AG in Winterthur. A pulse survey and the fourth resignation letter of the week land on your desk the same morning. Before you spend a franc, you must tell the Executive Board what is really wrong with your unit's energy.
The situation
It is January 2026. Robotics & Automation earns CHF 64 million of the company's CHF 218 million and was its growth engine for a decade; it even persuaded the rest of Helvetia to trial a compressed four-day week. Then a software migration went badly, two engineering teams were merged, and the unit head who had championed the four-day week left for a rival. You were promoted from Head of Applications Engineering, so several of your new direct reports were your peers five weeks ago.
HR's pulse survey places every answer on a grid of energy and its direction. Only 38% falls in the productive box, effort aimed at the work. 16% is effort aimed at something else (politics, blame, defending turf), and that share has doubled in a year. 24% describes people who have gone quiet and stopped raising problems; 22%, people who are comfortable and coasting.
The rest of the data is no kinder. Overtime averages nine hours a week and 31% of staff sit in the high-exhaustion band. On-time engineering milestones have fallen from 88% to 71%, putting a CHF 4.2 million medtech renewal at risk. Voluntary departures run at 18% a year against a 7% company average, and Finance puts the cost of replacing one engineer at about CHF 95,000.
The board's terms: within three quarters, productive energy above 55% and departures below 12%, with no new budget. Miss either and the unit is folded into another division, and the four-day week ends across the company.