There’s a dealership group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that does something most operators would consider insane.
Multiple times a month, they send employees from both of their stores—Toyota of Ann Arbor and Subaru of Ann Arbor—on the clock to volunteer at local nonprofits. Food banks. Park cleanups. Animal shelters. Children’s hospitals. Across the two rooftops, they partner with more than 17 community organizations. They organize employee events like basketball outings and book clubs. They track community hours served and dollars donated and put those numbers right on their websites for anyone to see.
And before you think this is some feel-good side project funded by a dealer principal with deep pockets and a soft heart, consider this: both of WE Auto Group’s stores were named Automotive News Best Dealerships to Work For in 2025. They’ve been recognized as AutoSuccess Champions of Charity. Subaru of Ann Arbor has earned the Love Promise Gold award. Toyota of Ann Arbor’s team is regularly out in the community cooking dinners at Fisher House for veteran families, building cat houses at the Humane Society, and matching employee donations to Rogel Cancer Center up to $20,000. Both stores are still here, still growing, still winning—while the average dealership across the country is hemorrhaging talent at a rate that should terrify every GM in the industry.
So what do they know that the rest of automotive retail doesn’t?
The Numbers That Should Keep Every Dealer Principal Awake
The 2025 NADA Dealership Workforce Study pulled data from nearly 2,500 dealerships and over 246,000 payroll records. The findings are brutal. Industry-wide turnover runs at 42% annually. Non-luxury stores hit 45%. Sales consultant turnover at non-luxury dealerships reached 73%—meaning nearly three out of four salespeople don’t make it 12 months.
One analysis of this data estimated the total cost to the industry at roughly $20 billion per year in recruiting, training, lost productivity, and the invisible costs nobody tracks.
Meanwhile, the top-performing dealerships in the country—stores recognized by Automotive News as “Best Dealerships to Work For”—operate at dramatically different retention levels. These outliers prove that high turnover isn’t inevitable—it’s the result of choices about culture, development, and leadership.
The gap between the best and the rest isn’t compensation. It’s not location. It’s culture.
What Community Involvement Actually Does to a Workforce
There’s a tendency in automotive retail to view community events as marketing plays—get the logo on a banner, hand out some business cards, generate goodwill that might turn into a car deal someday. That framing misses the entire point.
The real return on community involvement is internal, not external.
Employees who participate in company-sponsored volunteer programs are 52% less likely to leave, according to data compiled by Double the Donation. They tend to have 75% longer tenure. A study from the Corporation for National and Community Service found that organizations with employees who volunteer regularly experienced a 50% reduction in turnover. And Gallup’s research has consistently shown that employees with a strong sense of purpose at work are 5.6 times as likely to be engaged—and far less likely to be watching for or actively seeking a new job.
This is not soft data. Based on NADA’s own numbers—64 average employees per store, 42% turnover, and SHRM/Gallup benchmarks estimating replacement costs at 50–200% of salary—the average dealership is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just cycling through people. That’s money being lit on fire. And it could be redirected into building a team that actually stays.
The Employee-Customer Profit Chain That Dealerships Ignore
Here’s where this connects directly to the metrics every dealer principal already obsesses over.
Research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior studied 95 independently-owned car dealerships over six years and found that department culture consistently predicted higher subsequent customer satisfaction ratings and vehicle sales. Not the other way around. Culture came first. Sales followed.
Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that high levels of employee engagement correspond to a 51% reduction in turnover, a 23% increase in productivity, and a 68% improvement in employee wellbeing. In best-practice organizations, 75% of managers and 70% of non-managers are engaged.
Now think about CSI scores—the metric that directly determines OEM bonuses, vehicle allocation priority, and co-op marketing funds. One bad quarter of CSI scores can cost a dealership tens of thousands in lost incentives. And what drives CSI? The service advisor who remembers a customer’s name. The salesperson who follows up without being told. The technician who catches a problem before it becomes a breakdown.
Those are retention outcomes, not training outcomes. You cannot train someone to care about a customer they’ll never see again because they’re leaving in three months.
What WE Auto Group Gets Right
In 2025, both Toyota of Ann Arbor and Subaru of Ann Arbor were recognized by Automotive News as Best Dealerships to Work For. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the group treats culture as infrastructure—with dedicated roles, structured programs, and a cadence of community and team events that would put most corporate CSR departments to shame.
Start with the fact that WE Auto has a full-time Director of Community Relations, Valerie Niedermeier, whose job is managing the group’s community partnerships and organizing employee volunteer events. This isn’t something tacked onto someone’s existing responsibilities. It’s a dedicated position because the group treats community involvement as a core business function, not a side project. The group also created a Director of Training role—held by Dana Wines—who leads WE Auto University, a structured internal development program built around six pillars: Leadership, Sales, Service, Culture, Finances, and Wellness. That university recently launched its first Service Manager Development Program, a yearlong curriculum designed to build the next generation of leaders from within. In an industry where most stores promote their best salesperson into management and hope for the best, WE Auto is running a development pipeline.
Their CARING core values aren’t just words on a poster. They’re an acronym that drives daily behavior: Community Focused. Appreciate & Empower. Reliability with Integrity. Innovative. NONSTOP. Great Partner to Our Brands. Every monthly newsletter reinforces these values, recognizes employees who live them, and lists the upcoming community events for the month.
And the volume of those events is staggering. In April 2026 alone, Subaru of Ann Arbor’s calendar included volunteering with Food Gatherers, Hope Clinic, Ann Arbor Parks and Rec, and Ronald McDonald House, plus a U of M Charity Car Meet, the Big House 5K, and Subaru Loves the Earth Day—seven events in a single month. Toyota of Ann Arbor runs a similar cadence—cooking meals at Fisher House for veteran families, volunteering at the Creature Conservancy, and matching employee donations to Rogel Cancer Center.
Community partners across both stores span the full range of local need—from Alpha House (family homelessness) to Food Gatherers (food bank) to Habitat for Humanity to the Humane Society of Huron Valley to C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital to Meals on Wheels to the American Heart Association and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The group recently launched “Subaru of Ann Arbor Loves Every Ability,” an inclusion initiative partnering with the T. Wall Foundation and Skills & Abilities to create workplace experiences for individuals with disabilities.
Employee events go well beyond the obligatory holiday party. The two stores recently played each other in a basketball game—Subaru won 47–41, with Joe Schropshire taking MVP honors—and the group hosts an annual WeCare Awards ceremony with peer-selected recognition. Book clubs. Team outings. Activities that have nothing to do with selling cars and everything to do with building relationships between people who spend 50 hours a week together.
These aren’t random acts of corporate kindness. They’re a systematic approach to building what Gallup calls the four levels of employee engagement—from foundational expectations, through individual contribution, to teamwork, to personal growth. Community involvement hits the top two levels simultaneously: it builds cross-department relationships (Gallup’s Q10: “I have a best friend at work”) and connects daily tasks to something bigger than a monthly sales target (Q12: purpose and mission).
The “During Work Hours” Detail That Matters Most
Here’s the part that makes most dealership operators flinch: some of these events happen during work hours. Paid time to volunteer.
This isn’t lost productivity. It’s an investment with a measurable return.
Companies that offer paid volunteer time off see 5x higher engagement rates than those that don’t. And 93% of employees reported feeling better and less stressed after 12 months of volunteering—which means less burnout, fewer absences, and higher productivity during the hours they are on the floor.
In an industry where burnout is the leading driver of voluntary turnover, where a third of dealership employees say they’re considering leaving within six months, and where 48% of former employees cite poor benefits as a factor in quitting—paid time to do something meaningful isn’t a luxury. It’s a competitive advantage that costs less than a single hire.
The Recruiting Angle Nobody Talks About
Here’s the other side of this equation. Remember that Cox Automotive study that found 64% of people working outside the auto industry said they did NOT want to work at a dealership? The top reasons: long hours, poor work-life balance, and a culture they didn’t want to be part of.
Community involvement directly addresses the culture objection. A dealership that can show prospective hires photos of their team volunteering at a children’s hospital, cleaning up parks, or playing in a company basketball league is telling a fundamentally different story than an Indeed post offering “competitive pay and a fast-paced environment.”
An AutoTrader report found that 73% of car buyers value community involvement when choosing a dealership. The same dynamic applies to job seekers. And in a market where 79% of technicians are considering leaving the industry entirely, telling a better story about what it means to work at your store isn’t optional—it’s survival.
What This Means for Your Store
You don’t need 17 community partners. You don’t need to replicate everything WE Auto Group does in Ann Arbor. But you do need to understand that the data is now overwhelming:
Culture drives retention. Retention drives customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction drives profit. That chain is documented, measured, and proven—in automotive retail specifically, not just in general business research.
Community involvement and employee events aren’t line items to cut when margins get tight. They’re the infrastructure that keeps your best people from walking across the street to the store that’s hiring.
The dealerships that figure this out will operate at 20% turnover while their competitors burn through 70%. They’ll capture OEM bonuses their neighbors lose. They’ll build teams that customers trust and return to, year after year.
The ones that don’t will keep burning through people and wondering why their CSI scores won’t stabilize.
The math isn’t complicated. The choice shouldn’t be either.
Sources referenced in this article:
2025 NADA Dealership Workforce Study (246,000+ payroll records, ~2,500 dealerships)
Gallup, “State of the Global Workplace” (2024)
Gallup & Stand Together, “The Power of Purpose” (2025)
Journal of Organizational Behavior, study of 95 car dealerships over six years
Cox Automotive Dealership Staffing Study
Automotive News, “Best Dealerships to Work For” (2025)
Corporation for National and Community Service
Double the Donation, Volunteer Time Off Statistics
AutoTrader (2024 buyer preference data)
CDK Global, “Dealers Tackle Head Count Struggles” (2025)