Case Study 04 · People Analytics & Strategic Culture Work
The data told a good story. I didn't stop there — and that's what actually fixed something.
Overview — For Skimmers
As a co-founder of Fannie Mae's Marketing People Council, I leveraged quarterly all-employee survey data to benchmark the impact of our culture initiatives. The top-line numbers were improving. The CMO wanted a good story, and I had one ready to tell. Instead I kept digging — layering correlations, tracking trends by department, and ultimately slicing the data by employee level. What I found wasn't visible in the summary: associate-level employees were quietly disengaging as they advanced — the same people receiving promotions, strong performance reviews, and the largest raises and bonuses. Nobody had named it yet. We built an entire workstream around solving it. Attrition among that group dropped to nearly zero.
The Situation
Culture survey data has a natural gravity toward the comfortable story. Scores trending up, leadership happy, initiative validated. As co-founder of the Marketing People Council, I leveraged our quarterly survey data to benchmark the impact of the work we were building — and the comfortable story was available to me. The top-line numbers were genuinely improving. I could have packaged that, presented it to the CMO, and called it a win.
But the CMO was not naive. He knew there were cracks in the culture even as the headline numbers moved in the right direction. He wanted a real story, not a reassuring one — and I knew that stopping at the surface would mean missing whatever was actually happening underneath.
The Approach
I started layering the data. First by question correlation — looking at how different dimensions of the survey moved together and where they diverged. Then by department within the marketing division, tracking whether improvement was consistent or concentrated. Then, most importantly, by employee level.
That last cut is where the signal appeared.
Senior leaders and early-career employees were scoring notably above the divisional average. Middle management scores were softer — expected, given the demands of the role without the authority of a director. But the most striking pattern emerged among the associate levels: as employees advanced from junior to mid-level to senior associate, satisfaction scores declined steadily and significantly.
On the surface, this made no sense. These were the employees who had just been promoted. Who had received strong performance reviews. Who were likely earning the largest raises and annual bonuses in their bands. By every formal signal the organization sends — compensation, title, recognition — these employees were being told they were succeeding. And yet their engagement was quietly eroding with each step up the ladder.
The dip wasn't random. It was concentrated around three themes: workload imbalance, perception of limited growth opportunity, and — most critically — an inconsistent definition of what it actually meant to be a Lead Associate versus a Senior Associate versus an entry-level associate across different teams within the division. They had been promoted into ambiguity. The organization had advanced them without building the infrastructure to support what came next.
These were high performers. They made up the majority of the org chart. And nobody had named what was happening to them yet.
The Outcome
We built an entire workstream of the People Council around this employee group. The response addressed the three drivers directly: an associate mentoring program to rebuild investment in their development, first-time manager standards shared with Lead Associates so high performers could see and prepare for the next step, and a rotational program giving associates exposure to adjacent teams to address the stagnation they were feeling.
The results came gradually, then clearly. Culture survey scores for associate-level employees began rising steadily. Attrition in that group dropped to nearly zero. And as that cohort's engagement improved, it lifted the broader divisional culture scores along with it — because when the people who do most of the work feel seen and supported, everything around them works better too.
The CMO got his good story. It just took longer to find and was more honest than the one available at first glance.
The signal is almost never in the top-line number. It's in the layer nobody thought to look at yet.