Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"
As a manager through this boom and bust who was around for the previous boom and bust, I’ve had to lay off (the polite term for fire) dozens of employees. There are many strategies to learn how to deal with this – the one I find most effective is depersonalizing the terms used. Employee becomes a resource – firing becomes “let go” or downsized.
Some of these are no-brainers, the employee that sits in the corner not doing anything or is in a position that they cannot succeed at whose only reaction to being let go is relief. Some of these are the social lifeblood of the company – long term employees whose only fault that they are not current is that they’ve been too busy for some many years just “getting it done”. It’s this last group that is always the hardest to make it through the exit interview (more feel good lexicon).
Is it a wonder that “sorry – it’s just business” sounds so hollow and has resulted in a workforce that largely has no allegiance except to themselves. A great majority of companies like to expound on the reality that they are all just a large, extended family -- if you accept the incongruity that like the Inuit, our company puts our family out on ice flows when the going gets tough.
In today’s marketplace, our employees are all networked together. Is it a wonder that with all those publically available profiles, employee poaching is not going on or that employees are targeting employers that they want to work with? Like the early BBS’s of the early internet – if the information is available more lasting connections can be made but with that comes the danger of empowering our employees to make better decisions.
The quickest job decision I ever made was over MSN. An old contact reached out, read what I was doing since I worked with them and offered me a job on the spot.
While anecdotal studies point to people spending more time at jobs that last only a short time – research from Burgess and Rees show a different landscape with only a small change in average job duration values taken from the 70’s and 90’s. In fact, the trend that was most apparent was in weakening markets (’79-’83), average job length seems to increase.
So is loyalty to our employers gone? No – it’s just changed. Gone are the days of a single job and a single employer for life. Enter the new reality which places employee and employer on a level playing field with both looking for that elusive loyalty.
