For years, employee engagement surveys have asked, “How often do you think about leaving the job?” The chief executive of a multinational told me recently, though, that he and his senior colleagues had decided they were misreading the results: a high score was no longer a sign of disaffection, but simply a proxy for younger recruits’ appetite for more challenges.
He has started shifting these staff between jobs more often — every two to three years rather than three or four. They are offered secondments to other organisations, such as charities, from which they return energised and with new perspectives. He is now exploring whether to push ambitious younger staff into leadership roles sooner but, as he told me, “It’s difficult to lead other people if you don’t have that experience yourself”. Was this a prudent response, he wondered, or an old-fashioned view, based on his own more gradual career path?
There is a third possibility: that this CEO is simply facing the same challenges that have always faced employers as they work out how to meet the demands of younger recruits.