Apology for the graphic, but needed to illustrate the severity of the matter..!
These Veterans @ Business who are the long serving staff; had already created psychological barriers for the Management to lay-off, replace or reassign in different tasks.. Adding to this buzzle, Lobbies they join, Procedures they bureaucratically master, and inability to Lead or Mentor others.. They turn as a burden with lower productivity and stronger blockage of change..
They only fit for debates and arguments, not evolution or advancement of doing business.. However, these helps the Managers to secure their seats, where someone are there to justify whatsoever they want to advocate..
Manipulation of KPIs, Resistance to novelty, Skepticism of decision-making, Get things done by influence not by procedures, etc. are few of the toxic symptoms of the Veterans' Syndrome.. Yes, there are great guys among them, but they are part of the inevitable collateral damage..
Benefits and Challenges of Long-Tenured Employees
By Dr. Shirley J. Caruso, Ed.D.
Organizations can benefit from seeking out their long-tenured employees and utilizing their knowledge and experiences as power. Benefits of retaining employees include the following:
- Money is saved by not having to recruit and train new employees;
- A high level of productivity is maintained because time is not lost in bringing new employees up to speed;
- Focus is on innovation and growth as opposed a state of uncertainty;
- Strategic planning is guided by their knowledge and experience;
- They are relied upon for input to help avoid repeating past mistakes;
- Veteran employees have already mastered their own job tasks and are key candidates for cross-training, which makes the company more productive and flexible;
- They mentor and train others, which prove beneficial to all parties: the person mentored develops new skills, the experienced employee feels appreciated and gains a fresh point of view, and the company grows.
Long-Tenured Employees as Mentors
The mentoring role challenges long-term employees and establishes them as leaders. They nurture the culture while also providing a team-building example for apprentice employees. As team leaders, they build effective teams by addressing the task that is to be accomplished, and identifying the level of authority it requires. Assuming the task is of a more permanent nature, the team members will be more likely to invest in building constructive working relationships if they anticipate working with each other over an extended period of time. When members do not anticipate a long-term task or project, they are likely to make less effort to improve the group’s performance.
Long-Tenured Employees as Leaders
As leaders, long-tenured employees use their knowledge and experience to provide clarity of direction to enable a team to familiarize itself with a task. When direction is clear, team members have a more informed perspective and as a result are better able to decide on the most appropriate approach for accomplishing a task efficiently and effectively.
The Challenges Organizations Face
In spite of the benefits of having long-tenured workers, companies are faced with the challenge of overcoming complacency by the existing employees and a lack of new blood and ideas from the outside. Long-tenured employees tend to become dissatisfied with repeatedly receiving the same benefits. Experts recommend that employers provide flex time, the latest technology, training opportunities to keep employees interested and satisfied.
Summary
A Human Resource Development (HRD) professional can utilize the knowledge and experiences of long-tenured employees (Subject Matter Experts) when designing training for new recruits. If given new challenges and opportunities, long-tenured employees can be a company’s greatest assets for many years to come. An HRD professional must realize that as human beings, the needs of seasoned employees are constantly changing. If left unchallenged, the employee becomes unhappy with himself and therefore unhappy with the company at which he or she is employed. HRD professionals must perform an analysis of the employee as a learner (learner analysis) to identify, design, and implement new training to challenge the employee so the cycle can begin anew. The employees who are in search or a challenge or promotion rather than just a pay raise are the employees who are valuable to the company throughout their careers.
Image credit: https://www.mbaskool.com/business-concepts/human-resources-hr-terms/16573-job-tenure.html
https://hrdevelopmentinfo.com/benefits-and-challenges-of-long-tenured-employees/
Leveraging Long Tenure
| By Kathryn TylerMay 3, 2007 |
Want to reap the benefits of your long-tenured employees know-how and leadership? Help them fight complacency and challenge themselves at work.
After 13 years, Leslie Tripodi still loves her job. “Honestly, when I wake up, I’m excited to come here,” says Tripodi, a salesperson with CXtec, an information technology hardware company in Syracuse, N.Y. “I have the best job. I will grow old here. It never occurs to me to leave. I don’t know how many people can say that. There is high turnover in sales, but not at CXtec.”
What makes employees stay? How do you retain a group of employees for six years or more—especially in an industry like sales, which is notoriously known for high turnover? How do you prevent long-tenured employees from getting bored, letting their skills get outdated, and becoming resistant to change—or, worse, from going to your competition?
We asked those questions of three companies that have been named for the past three years to the Great Place to Work Institute’s list of Best Small & Medium Companies to Work for in America, a recognition program sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management. In each of these firms, 40 percent or more of their workers have been with the company for six years or longer. CXtec; ACUITY, a property and casualty insurance company in Sheboygan, Wis.; and Kahler Slater, an architectural and design firm in Milwaukee, all have discovered ways to maximize the benefits of having long-tenured employees. They also offer advice on the challenges of employing and keeping these experienced workers.
Tangible Benefits
Some benefits of retaining employees are obvious: Companies save money by not having to recruit and train new employees, and they maintain a high level of productivity because they don’t lose time while new employees get up to speed.
In fact, says Chason Hecht, president of Retensa, an employee retention services firm in New York, when companies don’t spend countless hours on restaffing and retraining, it becomes “easy to focus on innovation and growth, as opposed to treading water. If we’re constantly spending our time rehiring, retraining and rebuilding relationships, there isn’t time” for these important activities.
Retaining employees of all tenures can help drive a company’s success, but it is especially important to hold on to seasoned employees and to actively leverage their knowledge and experience because these employees can:
- Help guide strategic planning. Long-term employees know the company, product and industry so well that they are a fount of knowledge just waiting to be tapped. ACUITY has 774 employees, of whom 55 percent have been with the company for more than six years. The company involves long-tenured workers in “strategic plans for the company, serving on committees with other departments,” says Sara E. Larson, general manager in central claims for Acuity and an 18-year veteran of the company.
“Other departments and employees rely on long-tenured workers for input on what worked and didn’t work in the past,” to help avoid repeating past mistakes, Larson says.
- Acquire cross-training. Long-term employees who have already mastered their own job tasks are prime candidates for cross-training, which makes the company more productive and flexible. CXtec cross-trains many of its long-term employees. “They are continually learning more skills, which means we are able to adapt to give time off,” says Barbara Ashkin, vice president and COO of CXtec.
For example, a CXtec accounts receivable employee with nine years at the firm was cross-trained to perform the work of accounts payable employees. The two jobs differ significantly, Ashkin notes, with accounts receivable employees granting credit on sales orders and following up on collecting from accounts, while accounts payable employees pay vendors. Because the long-tenured accounts receivable employee had the cross-training, that employee was able to step in when an accounts payable employee went on maternity leave.
“We didn’t have to bring in an additional, temporary staff person,” Ashkin says, and using a cross-trained employee also was more efficient, since the person was already familiar with the people and the company.
- Mentor and train others. One of the best ways to leverage long-tenured employees’ knowledge is to pair them with less experienced employees. At architectural design firm Kahler Slater, senior employees are intentionally placed on projects with novice employees. “Our profession is still, to a large degree, an apprenticed profession. You learn on the job. That is where long-tenured staff are vitally important,” says John Horky, a principal and HR manager of Kahler Slater. “When we assess the complexity of a project, we assign people who can meet the challenge, but who will also need to stretch a bit. We surround them with people they can teach to.”
Mentoring benefits everyone involved: The person mentored develops new skills, the seasoned employee feels appreciated and gains a fresh perspective, and the company grows. “A senior project architect’s eyes light up when a less experienced designer asks them how to resolve a specific technical problem,” says Horky. “There is a large degree of personal satisfaction in being able to share my professional know-how with others; quite frankly, it validates my talents.”
Kurt Thieding, an associate/graphic design manager who has been with Kahler Slater for nine years, agrees that serving as a mentor can benefit a long-tenured employee. “The advantage of mentoring the three staff I manage is it keeps me challenged. They might bring new solutions to the table. Talking with them is not a one-way street. It broadens my thinking and brings a different perspective.”
At CXtec, seasoned employees facilitate training for others. Long-tenured employees, or salespeople of any tenure who have reached the company’s highest ranking for salesmanship, lead weekly roundtables at which employees discuss what they’ve learned in online training classes. This training role challenges long-term employees and establishes them as leaders, Ashkin says. The company benefits too: “One of our strengths is not only having the long-tenured employees, but the ability to leverage their knowledge to help our newer people grow so that we can continue to help our customers,” says Ashkin.
- Nurture the culture through team-building community service projects. Team-building exercises are nice, but team building with real-world impact is invigorating. “The way to create community within is to create community outside,” says Hecht.
At CXtec, each employee is expected to do some charitable work, says Tripodi, who heads the firm’s adopt-a-family project. “We support 29 charities and allow people to do nonprofit work on our time,” adds Ashkin. At one recent fundraiser for the Salvation Army, “about 50 of us in bright orange sweatshirts were outside [the stadium] in 38 degrees before a Syracuse University football game, ringing bells next to the red kettles,” says Ashkin. “We have found that our greatest strength is our strong commitment to our community. It helps you to form relationships between respective departments.”
The point person for each major community initiative tends to be a long-tenured employee, Ashkin says. Doing service projects renews their interest in their place of employment while also providing a team-building example for novice employees. As employee retention specialist Hecht says, “Maybe their jobs are a little monotonous, but next month they are going to a different community to provide a home for others. That is something to talk about. That is water-cooler conversation. This is where HR can create community inside the workforce.”
The Flip Side
Despite the benefits of having long-tenured workers, “the key challenge is complacency by the existing employees and a lack of new blood and ideas from the outside,” says Alan Weiss, president of Summit Consulting Group Inc., which specializes in management and organizational development in East Greenwich, R.I.
How do you keep these employees’ skills current, help them be receptive to change, prevent boredom and keep them satisfied?
“Address the other needs, wants and expectations of that population,” advises Hecht. “Long-tenured workers’ needs change.” Just giving them the same benefits over and over isn’t going to satisfy their new needs. For example, at one time a long-tenured employee may have been interested in business travel opportunities, but now wants to stay home with a young family; he may have liked the flexibility and added income of night-shift differential work, but now prefers more predictable daytime hours to meet changing health needs; or he may have needed on-site child care, but now needs elder care. Hecht’s recommendation: “Ask them what they want.” He suggests using a third party to interview long-tenured employees to get more candid answers.
Experts also recommend providing the following job enhancements to keep long-tenured employees satisfied and engaged:
Flexibility. Long-term employees are looking for flexibility to help them balance work with the rest of their lives. Flexibility and work/life balance is a commonly heard refrain when referring to employees with young families or elderly parents, but how about younger workers? What about recent high-school or college graduates? For them, too, flexibility seems to be a recurring theme. The 2002 People at Work Survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, a consulting firm based in New York, shows that 83 percent of workers ages 18 to 24 said their motivation at work is influenced by a flexible workplace (only 73 percent cited salary as important).
View a chart on the life cycle of the employee
“The old style of thinking is to solve everything with money. Money is not the issue,” says Rob Bennett, author of the Financial Freedom Blog at www.passionsaving.com and Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work (The Freedom Store LLC, 2005).
A 2004 study, Generation and Gender in the Workplace, conducted by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group in New York, found that Generation X and millennial generation workers are more likely to place equal priority on both career and family and less likely to put work ahead of family than were previous generations. These employees don’t want to give work priority over family, friends and recreation.
The management at CXtec understands that. “The senior and best salespeople define what is important to them, and we listen. Working from home, changing their hours, flexibility” are the most important things, says Ashkin.
For example, six years ago, when Tripodi’s children were younger, she didn’t want to work full time anymore. “I was one of the company’s top salespeople, but I didn’t know how I could stay. I proposed something part time. Now, I work 25 hours, but I sell like I’m here 40 hours. It worked out great for everyone,” says Tripodi.
“Leslie is the only salesperson with this arrangement,” Ashkin notes. “That said, if another employee was in need and a great performer, we would definitely listen. The person’s tenure would affect the decision.”
New technologies. Companies that take advantage of the latest technology engage employees in different ways. First, technology increases productivity, which means the company can be more flexible about family time. “We use technology to make our people more efficient, such as videoconferencing with our Buffalo office so that we don’t incur the travel time,” says Lisa Belodoff, director of marketing for CXtec.
Second, it keeps long-tenured employees’ skills current. “When I first started, we had to write everything in triplicate,” says Larson of ACUITY. “We’re paperless now. The technology is exciting, to see the progression from pencil and pen to point and click.”
And, third, new tools keep these employees interested. “As technology has evolved, the firm has evolved,” says Kahler Slater’s Thieding. “Print work, multimedia, web site work ... there’s always something new to learn.”
Mandatory training. Most successful companies provide training opportunities, but long-tenured employees might not take advantage of them or might be considered exempt from training, under the assumption that they know everything already. It’s crucial, then, to make continual training part of the employee development process.
Companies also should evaluate managers on whether they promote ongoing learning and professional development for employees of all tenures, Hecht says. Simply giving employees access to training isn’t enough, Hecht adds; managers need to support their employees’ continued training.
At ACUITY, “Managers rely on tools and training to keep employees engaged and motivated. They give their folks new assignments, [and encourage them to] learn a new program, lead a new project or a project team, attend conference seminars. All those offer job enrichment,” says John Signer, ACUITY’s vice president of HR.
ACUITY requires employees to take annual training classes to keep abreast of legal changes in the insurance industry. “The laws are constantly changing, and each state in which we operate is different,” Larson says. “The process is very similar—investigate, record statements—but every claim and customer is different. That is what keeps me engaged.”
Increasingly challenging projects. To keep long-tenured employees engaged, it’s critical to keep them interested in their work. Kahler Slater has mastered the principle of providing long-tenured employees with increasingly complex and interesting projects.
“There’s a lot of intrinsic value to design professionals to work on wonderfully complex, increasingly challenging projects,” says Horky. For example, Kahler Slater, in conjunction with artist Santiago Calatrava, was the architectural firm in charge of an addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum. “In 2001, it was named by Time magazine as the best design. It was a project-in-a-lifetime for many people in our profession. We offer lots of opportunities for once-in-a-lifetime projects” that differ in “technological, political or design complexity.”
Thieding has seen the firm move into challenging new work providing graphics and marketing for clients. “As I’ve grown in the firm, the firm has evolved to offer new opportunities. What has kept me here is the variety of projects,” he says.
Horky says, “What is engaging and challenging to you today is routine to you tomorrow. We need to put in front of you new assignments. We have to ratchet it up a bit. We need to assign you someone to work with—to do what you were doing—so that constantly we have to find new young staff to join the firm and do what you were doing yesterday so that you can go and do something [different] tomorrow.”
Opportunities for innovation. When a significant number of your employees are long-tenured, they know their jobs well and are highly productive, which frees up time and resources for innovation and growth. CXtec’s Ashkin says, “We continually remind the teams, ‘Change is constant.’ The real key to overcoming [a resistance to change] is a strong leadership team.”
Weiss recommends that companies ask long-tenured employees to “routinely and consistently improve and enlarge their jobs. Empower them to make decisions about resources, communications, clients, etc. The worst boredom is when you’re told what to do, rather than told to achieve a result and left to your own devices as to how to achieve it.”
For example, employees at CXtec are encouraged to “create their own career paths,” and, because the business is in a growth cycle, there are plenty of opportunities for employees to find their own challenges. “We had a fellow in our used equipment area who came into my office and said, ‘I think telephones are the way to go,’ ” says Ashkin. This long-tenured employee spearheaded the effort to start selling used telephone and voice-over-Internet-protocol equipment, in addition to new and used computer networking hardware. Not only was the employee able to innovate and gain satisfaction from taking charge, but the change doubled CXtec’s business in one year, Ashkin says.
Growing Old Together
“I feel like I blinked and it’s 18 years later. I don’t see myself ever leaving,” says ACUITY’s Larson. “The company encourages me to grow as a person and, as an individual, empowers me to do my job. I never see an end.”
Long-tenured employees are the face of the organization to many customers and vendors. It’s in every company’s best interest to seek out its long-tenured employees and leverage their knowledge and experiences.
And, if you give long-tenured employees new challenges, flexibility and opportunities, they can be your greatest assets for many years to come.
Kathryn Tyler is a Wixom, Mich.-based freelance writer and former HR generalist and trainer.
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/pages/0507tyler.aspx
How long have you worked for your current employer? Believe it or not, if you’ve reached the five-year mark, then you’ve already been around longer than the average American stays with the same company.
In an increasingly digital economy that is constantly evolving and becoming progressively more competitive, strong tenure can be difficult to achieve. In fact, the median number of years salaried workers had been with their current employer was 4.2 as of January 2018—down slightly from 4.6 years in January 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.1
While that overarching finding seems straightforward enough, you may be surprised to learn how much there is to unpack within that statistic. Consider, for example, the following questions:
What role does something like gender play in employee tenure?
What about age—how are Millennials faring in comparison to their preceding generations?
Are there also notable conclusions to be made based on ethnicity, education or industry?
And, finally, what can employers do with this valuable information?
Read on as we dig into the latest reports and uncover answers to these important questions.
What is tenure? How the latest stats fare
Information on employee tenure has been obtained by the Current Population Survey (CPS) every two years since 1996 through monthly sample surveys of approximately 60,000 households. As the BLS reports on its notable findings, there is a bevy of valuable information to sift through.
Employee tenure is defined as the length of time workers have been in their current job or with their current employer. Examining the varying aspects of things like employee turnover and retention rate can help illuminate important trends within the economy at large, specific industries and even singular companies, often highlighting potential areas for improvement.
The most recent national report was released by the BLS in 2018. The following facts were determined:1
Employee tenure by gender
In general, average employee tenure has seen a decline since 2014. The average amount of time American men had been with their current employer in 2018 was 4.3 years—unchanged from 2016 and down slightly from 4.7 years in 2014. Women in the U.S. saw a marginally larger decline in recent years, dropping from 4.5 years in 2014 to 4.0 years in 2018.
The numbers stay pretty comparable when we zoom out to examine the trends among longer-tenured employees. Among women, 28 percent had 10 years or more of tenure with their current employer in 2018. For men, the percentage sits a little higher at 30.
Employee tenure by age
As has been the trend in past reports, median employee tenure was generally higher among older workers than younger workers in 2018. For example, median tenure among 55- to 64-year-old workers (10.1 years) was more than triple that of workers ages 25 to 34 (2.8 years).
This may, on its surface, appear to justify the claim that millennials have garnered a reputation as “job-hoppers” who display a lack of commitment to a single organization. But a deep dive into the data reveals that young employees today actually stay longer with a single company than employees of the same age group did 25 years ago.
Employee tenure by ethnicity
Discrepancies in employee tenure are also found among the major race and ethnicity groups in America. Consider the following facts as they relate to the number of eligible workers who were, at the time of the 2016 report, employed by an organization with whom they’d worked for at least 10 years:
- 23 percent of Hispanic workers
- 25 percent of Black workers
- 25 percent of Asian workers
- 30 percent of White workers
Experts have explained the significantly lower percentage of long-tenured Hispanic workers by citing the relative youth of the Hispanic population in America. Younger people have, on average, shorter tenures across the board—so a young population can skew things statistically.
Employee tenure based on education
The amount of formal education members of the workforce have received is another interesting variable in the statistics surrounding employee tenure in America. Among workers aged 25 or older, those who’d obtained less than a high school diploma had lower median tenure than those with more education.
Men with less than a high school diploma, for example, saw a median tenure of 4.7 years, while women with the same qualifications landed closer to 4.2 years. Add in at least a college degree, and the median tenure jumped to 5.2 years and 5.0 years, respectively.
Employee tenure based on industry
While there are some statistics surrounding job- or industry-specific employee tenure—such as the fact that management positions see the highest median tenure at 6.4 years, while food service workers experience the lowest at 1.9 years—the more compelling data is found in the discrepancy between private- and public-sector workers.
Standing as one of the largest divergences in the entire report, public-sector employees—or employees who work in an industry that is tax-payer funded and service driven, such as teachers, police officers and other government employees—had a substantially longer median tenure than their private-sector counterparts. The median tenure for private-sector workers sits at 3.8 years while public-sector workers’ median tenure is a full three years longer at 6.8 years.
In the public sector, federal employees saw the highest median tenure at 8.3 years, while median state government employee tenure was 5.9 years. In the private sector, the manufacturing industry reported the highest median tenure among private-sector workers, with five years, while workers from the leisure and hospitality fields produced the lowest median tenure at 2.2 years.
What the facts about employee turnover really tell us
Experts have spent ample time analyzing the information gathered by the CPS as it relates to employee tenure in America. As such, a few conclusions have been made about the varying trends that were identified.
An overarching summary can tell us, for example, that “career” jobs that span an entire working life weren’t common for most workers in the early 80s, and they have continued to be uncommon for most workers. This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that job hopping is some new trend for this generation of workers.
It’s also interesting to note that distinct correlations have been identified between a decreased unemployment rate and shorter employee tenures. That is to suggest that a decrease in unemployment can result in workers feeling more comfortable with or empowered by the idea of changing jobs to pursue what might be considered riskier opportunities in a struggling job market.
Because millennials currently account for the largest portion of the American labor force, it can be helpful to examine the reasons they provide for having left an employer for a more promising opportunity. While they may not be the job-hoppers they’ve been pegged as, Deloitte’s 2016 Millennial Survey revealed that they are more likely to move from one opportunity to the next if they don’t feel empowered to achieve the levels of career success they’re chasing at their current organization.
In fact, more than six in 10 millennials reported feeling that their leadership skills were not being developed fully within their current positions, and they look for organizations with a vested interest in professional development, according to the survey.2
Finally, the notable discrepancy between public- and private-sector workers also reveals a lot about employee motivation to remain committed to a single organization. The contrasting results in median employee tenure, many argue, have everything to do with the way the government holds itself to a higher standard when it comes to how it treats its workers. This can be displayed by elements like fairer wages, retirement benefits, pensions and healthcare.
Learn more about employment trends
Are you fascinated by the granular details of employment and hiring trends in the U.S. and beyond? Or maybe you’re more interested in the psychology of the average American employee, eager to understand what motivates their decision-making process. It’s also possible that you’re motivated by the mission of employee satisfaction, and you’re curious about the current qualms that exist in today’s workforce.
Whatever it is that draws you into this topic, know that there are a number of different ways you can convert your curiosity into a career. If you’re pulled in by the idea of working at the heart of an organization to support both the talent and health of your company, you might want to consider pursuing a career in human resources. Not sure if that sounds right for you? Our article, “7 Signs You Should Be Working in HR,” can help!
1Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Tenure Summary 2018 [information accessed September 25, 2018] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm. Information represents national, averaged data and includes workers at all levels of education and experience. Employment conditions may vary in your area.
2Deloitte, 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey [information accessed September 25, 2018] https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/at/Documents/human-capital/millennial-innovation-survey-2016.pdf
https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/business/blog/employee-tenure-trends/
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