Linked: The Top Reasons Why Employees Leave Their Jobs
The Dumb Little Man website took this nice little nugget and tried to explain why:
“According to a Mercer study, a whopping one-third of all the new employees plan on just quitting their job in the next 12 months. “
This is a pretty drastic change in workplace culture. As you look around at your team, you have to consider the possibility that many (most) of them have no plans to be there for the next 5-10-15 years.
I have to be honest, I’m not a millennial, and I can’t remember the last time I started a job thinking I would still be there 5-10 years from now. I just don’t think that’s feasible any longer. Too many things change over that time for anyone to not at least consider the possibility of leaving for something else.
For example just think of the number of things that will change in 5 years on the job. Your boss may be different, other team members may come and go, the job might require different skills, it may have turned into something you don’t want to do, etc. The workplace is changing constantly.
And that’s just at work. Think about all the other changes that go on outside of work, and the varying demands that are made. You may find the need to relocate, you might have kids and want less-demanding work, more flexibility, etc.
Or you may have just taken a job and quickly realized it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be in the interview.
Personally, I left one job to be home more and closer to family. I wound up in a very regular 9-5 type job in a law firm. That worked for awhile, but after losing my in-laws and mom this year, and having to spend varying amounts of time in different cities to deal with funeral arrangements, and estate paperwork, I also came to realize that life is too short to use up all of your PTO on these kinds of things when you could just as easily have continued to work remotely while dealing with them. So, I left. To allow myself the freedom to be wherever I needed to be, and still be working.
Again, in my own life, things changed. What I wanted out of work changed. I went somewhere that matched up with what I wanted, now, fully expecting that will probably change again in a few years.
Knowing how fast our worlds are changing, can we really expect working in the same place for 20+ years to be the norm? I don’t see it.
