As recently as the early 1980s,
60% of workers in the private sector had a pension plan as their only retirement account. In this environment, loyalty to a single employer for decades was the safest way to prepare for retirement while earning a continually increasing wage. "Grow where you're planted" was the advice my dad gave me. A deeply loyal man who benefited from an environment that repaid deep loyalty in kind.
Today, that 60% has dropped to just 4%. No longer is the optimal play typically to pay your dues for 30 years hoping to rise up the corporate chain, building up a nice nest egg that hatches at 62 and a half years. Employee retention rates have dropped precipitously since the 1970s. Even since 2010, the turnover rate in the US
has jumped 88%. "These companies don't care about us," the argument goes. "If you're not jumping ship every year or two, you're leaving money on the table. You have to look out for yourself because they won't."
I understand that attitude. We've all seen competent internal team members be passed over for a role in favor of a shiny new external candidate, only for the latter to leave 12 months later. Still, I think the overall perspective culturally has swung too far towards cynicism, entitlement, and disloyalty. Sure, there is a time to move on, and finding a company that you want to grow with and invest in for a while may take a few tries, but shouldn't that be the ultimate goal?
Instead, a generation is being inured to default to a position of distrust and entitlement towards the big bad employer, giving them the least charitable interpretation of motives and events. It's as if an attitude of callously using the company for self-serving gain is excused by a perception and assumption that the company is going to do the same to the employee. To say little of the hypocrisy of repaying evil with evil, it's worth mentioning that the company isn't generally an amorphous, corrupt entity, but an organization of other people that depend to some degree on the employee in question.
Maybe I'm naive, and some bitterness and callousness is justified here. Even so, I believe the pendulum has swung too far, and sowing a little loyalty, trust, and benefit of the doubt can help one reap a much healthier work life. With experts predicting that by
2030, the US is set to lose $430 billion annually due to low talent retention, let's hope that more responsibility will be taken on both sides to bring balance to the (work)force.