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). 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.