“A job’s come up and I thought about you, Clarice. Not a job, really. More of an interesting errand. Sit down.” – Silence of the Lambs
The Boy and friend enjoy cocoa in the break room before heading back to conduct a PowerPoint® presentation on marketing to five year olds. Sadly, The Boy would soon be let go due to age discrimination.
After you’ve been at a job for a while, you begin to count people in the room. Not just on who you could push out of the way to get to the door for a quick escape if you needed to, or who to blame when you took the last cup of coffee in the breakroom without making more. No, after a while, you begin to feel like a survivor, mainly because the faces around you keep changing.
How many people in the room were there five years ago? How many were there 10 years ago? I mean, not that they’ve been in the room the whole time, but that worked for the same company? (I’m assuming your company is like mine, and they have kinda strict rules about not wanting you to living in the conference rooms – it’s horrible when you find that out the hard way.)
I looked at my emails from February 19 five years ago and counted the number of people who emailed me. Then I counted those that were still with the company. There were 10 out of 25 still with the company. I did the math, and that calculated to a greater than 20% attrition, each year. A better survival rate than a doughnut in Oprah’s dining room? Sure. But still pretty grim.
So, five years go by? The company’s changed out most of the employees in my random-ish sample. But what did the attrition look like for mid-level managers? When I did the math, it was greater than 45%. I was surprised – it was a huge number. These were the people who were responsible for company results – and, generally, the employees had been pretty good, and the company had been really profitable during that time period. Almost half of them would leave yearly.
But that 45% attrition wasn’t the highest number I have run into – I looked at another company that I used to work at. Over a five year period, they’d had an 80% attrition rate. 80%! There was only one guy out of sixteen left. It probably won’t surprise you when I tell you that company closed down two years after I visited.
And some positions are even worse. One particularly key leadership position that I’ve observed (since I have worked closely with this position on and off) has seen seven people in ten years. If I add in interim leaders? That number goes up to NINE people in TEN years. For one job. One key job.
I did some research online – what’s a decent attrition rate? Some HR personnel said that less than 15% was a good, healthy number. But the smarter HR people said . . . hey, 15% is high. We want zero attrition in our high performers.
But can you keep the good ones, like the key leeader revolving door listed above?
No.
The world is changing at a pretty rapid pace:
Professor Richard Foster (which sounds like a made-up name) from some so-called college called “Yale” was reported by BBC to have done a study that looked at company lifespans. Turns out the average life of a company on the S&P 500 in the 1920’s was 67 years. In 2011-ish when he did his study? 15 years.
Companies don’t last as long now – your career may last longer than the life span of many S&P 500 companies. High performers? Those that want to make a large contribution will be quitting and going to those companies that are growing – that’s where the opportunity is. You can’t stop them from doing this, unless you have incriminating photos, or are paying them more than you really should. The second isn’t something that a company that’s not growing can (generally) do, so, they leave.
For good or bad, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that workers under forty today will hold 12 to 15 jobs in their lifetime. In a forty five year career? That’s a new job every three years.
So, low retention rates, short lifespan companies, and a job market that is driven by high employee turnover – it doesn’t really sound fun.
Good news! There is a way to stay longer at a company you love: I hear one way to stay at a company longer is to hide in the air ducts and only come out after the security guard makes the 10pm walk through. Might even be some leftover doughnuts in the breakroom.
Nope. Oprah was here. Sigh. Guess it’s ketchup and mustard packets for dinner again . . . .
