It’s not the years, but what you put in ‘em!

A constant complaint one hears all around is that Millennials don’t stick to one job. After all, Deloitte’s research found that two-thirds of Millennials intended to leave their current organisations by 2020.

The accompanying moan is that loyalty is a thing of the past. It seems like not many are loyal to organisations anymore. Maybe, it’s time we explored the entire phenomenon around job-loyalty.

Loyalty works in two ways. Given recent turbulent times, we know that sometimes it’s not the worker quitting on the company, but the company quitting on the employee. We need to remember that Millennials have grown up watching a business world that has been rife with the financial crisis. They have read about companies shutting down, going belly up, falling like dead flies. They have seen their parents getting laid-off and read gory stories of families getting ruined because of the loss of jobs. Maybe, that has been an influencing factor in the younger professional’s concept of organisational loyalty.

Maybe companies themselves are not there for long periods anymore either. Their lifespans are dropping. In light of all this, does ‘loyalty’ itself need to be reviewed in its definition?

Longevity seems to have been redefined at both ends. Hence, the idea of retention of employees also needs to be redefined. Should companies have tough goals to retain employees? Some companies are acknowledging that they need not.

Some companies are instead putting in place the concept of a “tour of duty”(from the book ‘The Alliance’), where the employer and employee jointly agree on a specific “mission” that is beneficial to both employer and employee, who are “allies.” It’s a project they embark on with a finite end in mind.

Several companies realise that turnover is keeping businesses healthy. The inflow of new people is ensuring there is a steady inflow of fresh ideas, new perspectives and new bursts of energy.

The world is changing, and many companies are changing with it. It is slowly accepted that it’s not the tenure of the employee but what they do for the company in that tenure, that really matters.

It’s no longer about the number of years but what we put in those years!