People Just Don't Stay with an Employer as Long as They Used To and Other Myths

One of the most persistent myths about the work force is that employees don't stay with their employers the way that earlier generations did. It turns out this just isn't true. The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) has tracked decades of data on this, and no matter how the numbers are diced and sliced, changes in tenure patterns are minimal over time.

So where did this idea come from and why is it so persistent? I asked Dallas Salisbury, the head of EBRI, for his thoughts. His guess is that at the corporate officer level in public companies, things really have changed. CEOs now do have a short tenure, often under five years. New CEOs increasingly come from outside the company and bring in their own new team (a cause, I think, of much of the market turmoil and excessive executive compensation in recent years). Salisbury says that when these people now gather in the executive dining room, they see all these new faces and conclude that the rest of the world must be like them too.

The turnover myth is just one of a number of persistent legends that are at best interesting oddities or, at worst, causes for misguided policies. The so-called "war for talent" at the executive level, for instance, assumes there are always too few talented people for top-level jobs and that their numbers keep shrinking, even in a recession. It's a largely self-serving myth propagated by compensation consultants and high-level executives that Malcolm Gladwell gleefully dissected as far back at 2002. His article, reprinted at this link, is well worth reading.

Similarly, perceptions about generational differences in employee expectations, while having some grounding in reality, are largely fictional. See the article at this link for a brief synopsis of why. It turns out that we all want and have wanted pretty much the same things out of work for a very long time. Differences get even smaller when industry, education, and income are held constant. And, as I have often written, the "80-20" rule (that 80% of the performance in a company comes from 20% of the people) is pure nonsense backed by zero actual data.

The real danger of these myths is that, as managers, we start acting on the assumption that they are true. If we view people through these lenses, artificial though they are, people may start behaving consistently with our expectations, even if we would prefer they didn't. So before accepting the conventional wisdom we all know is true, take a few minutes to check out the data. Google makes it easy. Just put in the issue (such as generational differences among employees, and add "myth" or, at least, "research").