Eric's Answers
I recently made a comment on a LinkedIn Question posted by a user named Jon. The question related to one of my previous blog posts about entry-level hiring. Please view the thread here
The question was:
On average employees spend 2 1/2 years with an employer. How can (if it can) this trend be reversed?
Assuming this is data that captures voluntary ends of employment as opposed to terminations or lay-offs, we have to ask, what brought us here before we can begin to answer if we can change it.
In my opinion, what brought us here is decades of personnel strategy based on poaching from others instead of hiring from within. Also the elimination of career models and sourcing trends of moving things out of the company and offshore. We also have to acknowledge the consorted effort to convince employees to take control of their destiny and “own their career”.
The natural outcome is a free agent workforce. This is a natural market response. The workplace has become highly individual oriented. This is what should be expected, low-tenure workers. The 2.5 year average is what you expect in a highly individualized marketplace.
As a small business manager, my number one goal is retention of people for a decade. It is devastating to lose a great person after 1-3 years. My culture is much more collective and it looks and feels like company culture from 30 years ago. It feels different to work here.
I have also started to play around with entry-level hiring and I wrote a blog about it 2 months ago. Feel free to take a look and get a better understanding of where I’m coming from.
Feel free to share your thoughts as well. I received some great feedback from my original blog post and it would be great to keep the conversation going.
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Comments
If you put together an
If you put together an organization whose mandarins are the usual MBA suspects with the customary MBA thought processes, why would you be surprised that so many organizations look alike?
Some say kill all the lawyers- maybe they should instead say eradicate MBAs from business organizations, as well as their talk and their hype.
There is a concept from neurolinguistic programming that states “The map is not the territory”. It means that whatever model you make of something, that does not mean that the model is the thing. MBAs and other business people with related graduate degrees more often than not get obsessed with models, bromides, and fetishes of a moment, rather than enduring knowledge grounded in authentic experience.
If an employee or some department is merely an expense, you can shamelessly devalue it into a third world backwater outsource because you started by forgetting about human beings and the role of the mind and heart. You also forgot the holistic integration of business operation that is only possible with a kinesthetic appreciation of its reality, as opposed to its abstract model.
If you assume that expertise and knowledge only comes from the top down, you lose all the knowledge and experience that comes from experience that is accumulated by your employees.
Until we are reminded that young and old, novice and journeyman, all have a role and place, and a requirement that they are respected according to authentic experience, we cannot expect MBA-dominated organizations to ever value long-term employee loyalty and long-term development.
Have them join a movement...
I think one of the things great organizations do, is to have their company embody a purpose beyond the financial goals. When employees join, they’ll join for the purpose or for the movement it represents, rather than joining for the company alone.
If they consider leaving, then they aren’t just leaving a job or it’s co-workers, but they are potentially abandoning the movement - which if compelling becomes very painful.
BTW - I believe IC Stars is such a movement :)