AMC Cut Turnover to 22% by Redesigning Performance Management

AMC Entertainment has cut employee turnover to 22%, three years after redesigning its employee experience and performance management approach around retention rather than paperwork. The figure came from Adam Murphy, the company's director of people analytics and systems, during a presentation at SPARK Talent 2026 alongside Stephanie Garcia, manager of theatre learning and development.

The session addressed a complaint HR teams have voiced for decades: performance reviews generate more administrative clutter than measurable results. For AMC, the fix required changing what performance management is built on — the employee's environment, journey and whole person — before changing the review process itself.

What changed in the numbers?

The 22% turnover figure anchors the business case. Murphy framed it as the outcome of a deliberate three-year investment in two areas: traditional total rewards, and technology designed around the employee experience. The effort also targeted friction removal as a distinct workstream.

"We focused in on this position [with employees] and realized that's where we need to redesign experience, we need to understand the employee journey," Murphy said. "[So] we invested in both traditional total rewards, we invested in technology built around experience. We looked at some of the exercises for removing that friction and making a better work experience for them."

His follow-up sentence carried the result: "And as a result now, three years later, turnover has dropped to twenty-two percent."

For HR leaders, the sequence matters. Retention came first, because a constantly rotating workforce makes personalized performance systems impossible to sustain. Only after employees stayed longer could AMC's HR team invest time in understanding individual capabilities and development paths.

How does the 'whole person' philosophy work?

Garcia described the design principle behind AMC's ecosystem: performance management built around the employee as a complete person — their hobbies, family and needs beyond the workplace — rather than their output alone.

"We created an ecosystem that truly is one that's built around all of the things that can work together to ensure that we're coming up with a solution that can be not only here today but be able to continue on after the event or the initial launch has happened," Garcia said. "Our ecosystem really focuses on capabilities and that development at an individual level."

The emphasis on durability is a pointed one for HR buyers. Garcia explicitly distinguished the design from initiative-based programs that fade after launch — a common failure mode for performance-management rollouts that depend on a single event or campaign.

Why audit the theatre environment first?

Before launching any initiative, AMC examined what was disrupting its workforce most. The answer was not process or policy — it was the physical and operational environment of each theatre.

"Our environment is mainly our theaters, right? We needed to know what's happening in that environment," Garcia explained. "We wanted to know, were there physical barriers that were intruding if we wanted to put a new initiative out? Is there something with the workflow or the processes that they have already in place there about work scheduling, or perhaps that we have a lot of minors?"

The questions surfaced practical constraints HR teams often miss. A workforce that includes many minor-aged employees carries scheduling and legal limits that shape what a performance initiative can realistically demand. Physical barriers and existing workflow habits can quietly kill a program that looks fine on paper at headquarters.

What should other employers take from it?

The AMC model rests on three dependencies the presenters argued in sequence. First, understand who your employees are and the environment they work in. Second, prioritize retention so the investment in individuals has time to compound. Third, build the performance ecosystem around individual capabilities rather than one-off events.

The payoff metric AMC chose to report publicly was turnover, not engagement scores or review completion rates — a signal of how the company ties its performance-management redesign to workforce stability. Employers evaluating similar overhauls will likely face the same capability and adoption questions: whether the system survives past launch, and whether the environment it operates in has been audited first.

As AMC's three-year result suggests, the turnover dividend from that groundwork takes years, not quarters, to appear.