Opinion: How should startups keep great employees? Let them go

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One out of five of my employees won’t be in their roles next year. And I couldn’t be happier.

Millennial job hopping has understandably created a lot of hand-wringing in the HR world. According to LinkedIn, millennials now expect to change their jobs every 2.5 years—double the rate of Gen X. These days, candidates aren’t just switching jobs, they’re often switching industries.

But what if this isn’t a cause for alarm? What if it’s actually a strategic advantage for businesses?

Traditionally, employee retention has been considered one of the hallmarks of company health. I’d argue that’s still the case, but focusing blindly on retention actually misses the bigger picture. The metric we should be tracking is what I call people movement—the oxygen pulsing through a business.

What is people movement?

To be clear, I’m not talking about churn or turnover. Losing employees altogether is rarely a good thing. Instead, people movement encompasses all the internal role changes that happen within an organization. Part of this will be promotions, but an even more critical piece is lateral and diagonal movements of staff to different teams and departments.

To put it simply, moving people out of their current roles is as important as keeping people in their roles.

Contrary to accepted wisdom, this kind of people movement isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s vital to organizational health. To put it simply, moving people out of their current roles is as important as keeping people in their roles.

This isn’t lip service. We made it a company-wide goal, right alongside revenue targets, to ensure that 20 percent of our employees, or around 200 people in total, aren’t in the same seat by the end of 2017. It’s an open declaration to managers and staff alike that shifting roles is part of our culture and encouraged, not suppressed.

For so many companies, the opposite is true: you are, in no uncertain terms, expected to “do your time” before moving over or moving up. I understand this thinking. Managers make an investment in training and expect to see a return on that. But the world is moving too fast for this model, and it’s time we evolved. Here’s why.

The two-way street of people movement

For the right employees, an open people movement policy is a boon. The chance to learn new skills—and fast—is quickly expanding their professional toolkit and building a stronger resume. How important is this to employees today? Around 65 percent of millennials say that personal development is the most important factor on the job, according to a UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School study.

In my company, we’ve seen salespeople shift to product management and marketing specialists to corporate development. Talented individuals who enter the company with one skill set are able to level up and acquire expertise in a whole new area. Rather than locking them into one role, love it or leave it, we’ve given them routes to learn and grow with the company, leading to happier, more fulfilled employees.

Photo credit: Hootsuite.

So how do you actually pull off a people movement program?