What market share and retention data reveal about the cost of not supporting neurodiversity in the workplace
Every organizational culture is a running argument between two instincts: the pull toward big-picture thinking, the next product, scale and speed, and the pull toward meticulousness, the unglamorous work of catching the details. The prioritization of the former is more common in company culture. The people who provide that second instinct, the meticulous checking that big-picture ambition depends on, are disproportionately neurodivergent, and they are usually the first ones to sense when an organization has stopped valuing what they do, long before the culture problem shows up on a dashboard.
The fallout that Boeing has faced is what that gap looks like at industrial scale.
Boeing’s senior engineers walked out the door, dropping the average tenure from 16.4 years to 12.6 years. They were the people who carried the institutional memory, the mistakes made, the fixes found, the specific knowledge behind the building of the 787. Despite expensive retention packages, only 9 out of the 26 critical engineers were retained. Airbus filled their hangars by showing steady market growth, a clearer quality narrative, and opening up a new production facility within reach of the talent leaving Boeing.
When addressing the relationship between market share and retention, Airbus’s outperformance traces back to its prioritization of engineering-led innovation and fleet standardization. This is a sharp contrast with Boeing’s shift toward financial prioritization and accelerated production
The Missing Metric
Every leadership team obsessively tracks Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), what a customer relationship is worth over time, but does not apply the same rigor to the people generating that value in the first place. Employee Lifetime Value (ELV) is calculated as average revenue per employee multiplied by average tenure. A handful of longest-tenured, highest-context people are carrying a disproportionate share of this value.
Meanwhile, businesses treat anything above 5% annual customer churn as a threat to sustainable growth, while calling 10 to 15% annual employee turnover “healthy.” The exact departures a company would fight hardest to prevent if they showed up on a customer dashboard are filed away as normal attrition.
Airbus’s advantage lines up with what prioritizing retention over headcount churn, protecting ELV instead of just refilling seats, would predict.
While there are many ways to spin the business case, what is well-documented about neurodivergent individuals is that they tend to be highly attuned to gaps between what an organization says it values and how it actually behaves. When they detect that CLV is overshadowing ELV, disengagement tends to start quietly, long before it shows up as a resignation.
Success of Neuroinclusion Structure on Retention
JPMorgan Chase launched its Autism at Work program in 2015 with four software testers: a direct response to a shortage of IT talent. This program eventually grew to 300 hires by 2023: participants were measured at 90 to 140% more productive than their neurotypical peers, up to 48% more efficient, and produced measurably higher-quality output with lower error rates.
SAP built a parallel model in partnership with Specialisterne, the Danish firm that pioneered matching autistic professionals to roles built around their strengths. That program now spans 150 colleagues across 24 locations in 12 countries, in roles ranging from software development and finance to leadership positions. And it holds a 94% retention rate.
The mechanism behind both: quality assurance and cybersecurity increasingly draw on exactly the cognitive strengths that show up disproportionately in autistic professionals, sustained pattern recognition, precision, and an intuitive ability to spot anomalies. One industry estimate puts the reduction in production-code bugs from specialized autistic QA teams at close to 40%. Separately, teams with ADHD professionals show a roughly 30% higher ability to solve problems under uncertain conditions. And yet more than 80% of autistic adults remain unemployed or underemployed. The JPMorgan and SAP numbers are not describing a rare unicorn hire that got lucky, but a talent pool sitting almost entirely untapped, while companies without a deliberate strategy to find and keep it default to treating every departure in this population as ordinary churn, walking into the same trap as Boeing.
The knowledge that walked out Boeing’s door wasn’t generic, and neither is the expertise JPMorgan and SAP built specific hiring infrastructure to capture and retain. Neither company got those numbers by running a standard hiring funnel and hoping for the best. They got them by building the structure first – through deliberate programs and neurodiversity training for managers and teams – and organizations lose that same talent the moment attention shifts away from preserving the conditions that let it thrive.
A Different Question
Given what we know about neurodiversity in the workplace and business cases like Boeing’s vs. Airbus’s, it is clear the question that leadership should be asking is “what would it cost us in market position if our five highest-Employee-Lifetime-Value people left this quarter.” That reframes retention from an HR metric into a market share protection exercise. Boeing did not lose market share because Airbus out-innovated it on the product. It lost market share because it did not consider that question and continued to prioritize speed and financial engineering over the depth and retention that question would have protected.
The Takeaway
Every organization has Employee Lifetime Value concentrated in a small group of people, and most leadership teams have no idea who those people are and what they are actually worth due to the skewed prioritization of CLV vs ELV. For neurodivergent talent specifically, that blind spot runs even wider, because the signals of disengagement rarely look like the signals most leadership teams are trained to watch for until meticulous, detail-oriented, and accurate neurodiverse talent is gone and market share plummets. This is a pattern we see repeatedly in why neuroinclusion keeps failing.
If you are ready to find out who is carrying your organization’s highest Employee Lifetime Value and what it would cost to lose them, grab a free 30-minute Neurodiversity Strategy Consultation with Burch Price & Associates. We help C-suite and HR leaders protect the expertise that teams do not know they are losing until it is gone.
