Turnover went from 50% to nearly zero with Cloverleaf

McKinney is an award-winning integrated advertising agency based in Durham, NC, part of the Cheil Worldwide network, with ~400 employees and clients including Pampers, Samsung, and Little Caesars.

The roadmap started with listening.

McKinney wanted to lower turnover and make sure people genuinely wanted to stay. The first step wasn't tools. It was listening, really listening, to understand where people were and what was getting in the way. After that, they built a roadmap. Cloverleaf was part of it.

A colleague had recommended it. They ran a trial. They decided to implement it. Fast forward a year: turnover was almost nothing.

Like many companies that went fully remote during the pandemic, McKinney had teams of people who had never met in person. Some had joined straight out of college into a remote role. An us-versus-them mentality had developed across departments, a common outcome when people don't have the shared context that comes from physical proximity.

Cloverleaf gave people language to understand each other. Not just themselves. Not everyone communicates the same way or needs the same information to make decisions. Understanding that changed how departments worked together.

What happened next was something Christy Cole had never seen before with tools like this. People who had been resistant, who hadn't wanted to engage, became internal advocates on their own. Without prompting. Colleagues were talking about Cloverleaf in the hallway, not because someone told them to, but because it was actually working.