The future of work is mission-driven.
Why the best jobs define business goals, not skills required.
Once upon a time in a land not far away, companies used to hire employees right out of universities, place them at the bottom of a career ladder and then prod them to climb up with the promise of rewards or threat of punishment.
That hiring strategy is now a thing of the past…it might as well be a fairytale.
Job Hopping is Surprisingly Normal
A Harris Poll by CareerBuilder found that 45% of employers hiring a college graduate expect the hire to stay with the company for two years or less. The Bureau of Labor Statistics showed, in a 2018 report, that the employer expectations are right. The median tenure for workers in the 20–24 age bracket has consistently been 1.3 years for the last decade.
The same Harris Poll showed that by “the age of 35, 25% of workers have held 5 jobs or more.” This is similar to the average number of jobs held by Baby Boomers according to a 2017 labor market analysis.
Other generations follow the same pattern. Pew Research found that 63.4% of 18–35 year old Millennials stayed over 13 months. When Gen Xers were the same age, 59.9% stayed over 13 months.
The point is, job hopping is not a special characteristic of Millennials. From at least 1975 until now, people have changed jobs to find how their strengths, passions, and career goals match the labor market.
If you are running a business, chances are you’re already painfully aware of this trend. It’s expensive to replace people and so we spend a huge amount of energy trying to ensure that the best people stick around.
The problem is, they don’t. At least not with the way we define roles and career ladders today.
What Talent Wants
From the employee’s point of view, the sobering reality is that progressing a career through promotions and raises at the same employer for more than two years will reduce their lifetime wages by 50% or more.
In other words, loyalty doesn’t pay.
Literally.
“More workers are pursuing opportunities with various companies to expose themselves to a wider range of experiences, build their skill sets, or take a step up the ladder in pay or title,” said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of Human Resources at CareerBuilder.
The notion of a career ladder is morphing into what Adam Smiley, the author of the Quarter life Breakthrough calls, “Career lily pads.”
Unlike career ladders, lily pads extend in all directions, providing the employee with a series of interconnected opportunities. Within this new system, one is able to take leaps that make sense for them, given their goals and interests, without being limited by a prescribed career ladder. As a result, they are more likely to take risks and experiment, defining their career on their own terms rather than their employer’s.
If these job hopping and lily pad career path trends have been around for nearly half a century and show no signs of slowing, why are we still asking, “How do we retain people longer?”
Novel talent loyalty strategies will not change the overwhelming norm.
Instead, we should spend our time figuring out, “What are the most valuable outcomes that we and the employee can create during the 12–18 months they’re with us?”
Because, in the end, the company and its employees want the same thing: Growth.
Building a Mutual Growth Culture
The key phrase from the lily pad idea is, “a series of interconnected opportunities”. It implies that the career path of the future will be all about setting new, challenging missions for growth and value creation every year or two, instead of defining a linear ladder towards seniority.
In their book, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh, and Reid Hoffman, say, “The business world needs a new employment framework that facilitates mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. An ideal framework encourages employees to develop their personal networks and act entrepreneurially without becoming mercenary job-hoppers. It allows companies to be dynamic and demanding but discourages them from treating employees like disposable assets.”
They are saying something slightly obvious, but too often forgotten. The most effective way to get the best out of your employees is to have them engaged at work. And one certain way to engage folks is by activating their personal sense of mission and aligning those motivations with tangible business goals.
This is what it means to be mutually, mission-driven towards growth.
Designing Mission-Driven Work
The aim is for an employer and employee to co-create the activities of a job, starting with a very clear understanding of the company’s growth objectives and the (potential or current) employee’s motivations.
As employers, we might not get too excited about this. It’s our job to define what we need from employees, right? Plus, given the range of values and aspirations that exist within the human population, building harmonized alignments with every individual could turn into a management mess.
So here are some ideas on how to do it productively:
Tours of Duty: The employer and employee write a commitment to perform a specific mission over a 2–5 year period. It describes how the employee will grow while building a valuable asset or making an important change in how the company does business. A Tour gives the employee an opportunity to transform both their career and the company they work for in one, very concrete and valuable way.
Job Adjustments: Every review cycle — ideally several times a year — ask the employee to sort the tasks of their job into two groups: those that give them energy, and those that they find draining. Then, to the best extent possible, build work activities into their job that are linked up with their motivations. Because people’s interests and aspirations change with time, it’s best to assign hard work that people are most be interested in doing well. The outcome is to maximize productivity. And what we know about people is that they are at their best when they enjoy what they do. To state the obvious, jobs are not always going to be fun, but effort can be fulfilling if you care about the work.
Mission Mentors: One of the simplest ways to inject meaningful motivation into work is to hear from others who already experience it. Employers can connect rising stars and leaders inside and outside of the company, not based on their job titles but based on their career motivations. You’ll want to ask:
- “Who loves doing what the rising star is aspiring to do?”
- “Who are the most passionate folks in our industry?”
- “Who can show what mission alignment looks like?”
The Future of Education is Mission-Driven too
As a final note, these market changes are sparking similar changes in education. Stanford’s Purpose Learning concept imagines students picking missions rather than majors. African Leadership University was just selected as Africa’s most innovative company in part for implementing mission-driven programs.
The internet has democratized learning and skill-building through online courses and certifications, enabling people to up-skill and reinvent themselves multiple times throughout their career.
The key to success in this era is knowing how your company’s objectives create value and how your employee’s jobs contribute to that. If you understand people’s deeper motivations for work, you’ll be able to design and market jobs that fit the potential of an employee.
Authors:
Ibanga Umanah is a Cofounder and the Head of Strategy for Brave Venture Labs. Brave is a people science company uncovering the drivers of performance for better recruiting and talent management.
Amina Islam has a Ph.D. in engineering and is currently putting her skills and academic background into doing evidence-based research on the impact of informal learning programs.
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