My company had a 33.4% turnover rate. Our COO thought the solution was to stop asking why. I disagreed. So I built something.
The Problem Nobody Wanted to Face
It was 2022. I was 28, running a team and a business, watching good people leave every single month. Different faces, same pattern. Something was clearly broken — in the culture, in the leadership, in the gap between what we said we stood for and what people actually experienced day to day.
In a leadership meeting, our COO finally put it on the table: why are people leaving?
I had an answer. Use Glassdoor. Use public feedback. It's free, it's real, it's already out there — employees telling the truth anonymously because they have nothing left to lose.
He called it a dumb idea. Too biased.
I didn't argue. I just couldn't let it go.
The Real Problem With How Companies Listen
Because the real problem wasn't the data source. It was that we — like most leadership teams — had built an entire culture on assumptions.
On what leaders thought was happening. On what people were willing to say to your face when their job depended on it.
Nobody was asking the honest questions. And nobody had a tool that would give them honest answers.
Building the Tool That Didn't Exist
So I spent the next couple of years building one.
mapMyCulture started as a simple idea: what if you could take the unfiltered signal from public employer reviews, structure it across key culture dimensions, and give leadership teams a picture they couldn't get from any survey?
Then it grew. What if you could add anonymous internal surveys — not the 50-question annual ordeal, but focused, dimension-specific pulse checks? What if you could score both data sources on the same model, compare them, and track changes over time?
What if you could show a leadership team, with actual data, where their culture was strong, where it was cracking, and how they compared to the companies they were losing talent to?
That's what mapMyCulture became. A culture diagnostics platform that gives leaders the unfiltered picture of their culture — not the cleaned-up survey results, not the exit interview pleasantries — the real signal.
What 33% Turnover Taught Me
Here's what I know from living inside a 33.4% turnover environment: people don't leave companies. They leave cultures that stopped making them feel safe, valued, and heard.
And most leaders have no idea that's what's happening — until it's too late.
The patterns are always the same:
- Communication breaks down first. Information stops flowing freely. People hear different things from different leaders.
- Trust erodes quietly. Employees stop raising concerns because the last person who did got nowhere.
- Engagement drops before performance does. By the time productivity dips, the damage is already done.
- The best people leave first. They have options. They don't wait for things to get better.
Every one of these patterns is detectable — if you have the right data. Not annual surveys. Not exit interviews. Real-time culture signal from both public and private sources.
The COO Was Half Right
The COO wasn't wrong that bias exists in public reviews. Angry people are more likely to post. Recent experiences weigh heavier than long-term patterns. Platform demographics skew the sample.
He was wrong that the answer is to stop listening.
Public reviews are one signal among many. When you combine them with internal data, control for recency bias, and score across multiple dimensions, the noise falls away and the signal becomes remarkably clear.
The companies that are winning the talent war aren't the ones ignoring public feedback. They're the ones using every available signal to understand what their people actually experience — and acting on it before the resignation letter arrives.
That's why I built mapMyCulture. Because every company deserves to see their culture clearly. And every employee deserves to be heard — even when they can't say it to your face.