Is job loyalty a trait? And other thoughts on retaining employees

I recently read this post by Paul Dix who discusses how job hoppers may make very good entrepreneurs. He was responding to this post by Mark Suster, a tech VC, about how job hoppers make terrible employees.

Essentially, Mark’s post suggests that you can look at someone’s resume, and, if he’s had more than six jobs before the age of 30, then he’s a job hopper and will not be loyal to a company, so you shouldn’t hire him or fund him as an entrepreneur.

Paul makes some great arguments in response: “Loyalty should be earned by building an environment that’s mutually beneficial;” “You can’t establish a pattern by looking at someone’s resume;” A major reason job hoppers leave is that they don’t feel a sense of ownership, like not being included on decisions. He also mentions that employees are in it for their own self-interest and it’s silly to expect someone to work at a company for the company’s benefit. I mostly agree with everything Paul is saying, but I have a few other thoughts to add. This isn’t really an argument for or against hiring job-hoppers, but more about what you should look for and how to retain employees.

Firstly, loyalty does not appear to exist on any personality tests. The Big Five personality test is the most validated personality assessment, and there’s really nothing that comes close to loyalty on it. Persistence is considered a trait or strength, and, unlike loyalty, persistence is centered around a goal, not a person or a company. Self-control is also probably related, and has been shown to be a robust predictor of many positive outcomes (Tangey et al., 2004). But loyalty as a personality trait doesn’t really seem to be studied, though just about everything exists as a state and trait. However, this is something that an employer wants, and there is a pile of literature about employee retention. This literature takes the employer’s perspective, asking the question of what they need to do in order to retain employees – not so much the other way around.

Secondly, a primary consideration involved in hiring employees should be value alignment. Values are guiding principles of life that are stable across time and situations (Kasser, 2002, p.123). Values influence whether we like something or not, what goals we choose, and thus the behaviors we exhibit (Kasser, 2002). Most people’s values relate to being and connecting with people (relatedness), having freedom and control over their situation (autonomy), and wanting to do things well and grow in their abilities (competence). These are basic psychological needs, and much of workplace research boils down to how these things affect performance. (This and impact or meaning. I’ll get to that later.)

Further, these psychological needs are major players in motivation. Motivation is the reason or reasons behind why you do what you do. Meeting these psychological needs supports a person being intrinsic (driven by interest). Yet, we often do things because they are valuable to us or because we have to do them, and not because they are interesting. A job is usually a mix of different motivations – most of us can’t always do what interests us every second of the day. Otherwise, the garbage would never be taken out. But we do have to realize that it’s important to take out the garbage. We gain this understanding as we grow. We form our values. The more we align with a value, the more we experience it as something we are freely choosing to do, rather than being controlled and forced to do it (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

Thus, it’s important to hire people whose values align with the company, and if the company supports autonomy, competence, and relatedness, most people’s values will likely align. Paul is quite right: “Loyalty should be earned by building an environment that’s mutually beneficial.” What this really means is that employers should genuinely care about the people who work for them, making sure their psychological needs are met. Companies that offer childcare, paternity leave, flexible work ours, growth opportunities, etc. show this – they respect that the employees are actually human beings, and without them, the company would not exist.

Paul mentions that many people leave a workplace because they didn’t feel a sense of ownership or weren’t involved in decisions. This not only keeps them from feeling autonomous, but also shows a lack of trust and respect for them (relatedness). This leads to a lack of reciprocity – why should someone respect a company or a boss that does not respect them? If they can’t make decisions, this also affects their ability to grow and may also make them feel less efficacious, ultimately leaving their need for competence unfulfilled.

One example of a company that seems to be doing well and has a massive amount of autonomy is the democratically-run Alvarado Street Bakery. Their employees not only own the company, but they vote management into position. (They were featured in Michael Moore’s Capitalism and mention having very little turnover.)

I don’t entirely disagree with Mark, however. I agree that you shouldn’t hire someone that appears to be only looking for a paycheck (unless they are doing work that is not creative or complex). Vansteenkiste et al. (2007) found that extrinsic value orientation (orientation toward money, fame, or power) was associated with less satisfaction with, dedication to, and vitality on the job, as well as higher emotional exhaustion, short-lived satisfaction after achieving goals, and turn-over intention. Interestingly, they also found that raising their salary, even if they thought they wanted money, didn’t change these effects.

These researchers also found that holding extrinsic work values thwarted the satisfaction of basic needs. This makes sense – if your values are a façade over top of an intrinsic self that is being ignored, there will constantly be dissonance. You will constantly have value conflicts or choose to leave a basic need unfulfilled in favor of making money. For example, I know people who stay at jobs that force them to work overtime with bosses that badger and belittle them because they believe they can’t afford to leave. This is not what life should be. In this case, they are undermining their needs (and values) of being respected, spending time with their family, feeling successful and competent, and having freedom in order to fulfill a different value, thinking that they’re supposed to tough it out.

Maybe Mark values people who are willing to endure long lengths of misery, or be extrinsic in their motivations (e.g., doing something because someone else wants you to, or because you think you should, even though you don’t really value it). However, just because someone did a job for money once does not mean that they are doing it again. Maybe they left that job because they were looking for more meaningful work. Maybe they left because they had a controlling boss. (Mark comments on people who leave because they didn’t like their boss saying that this means to him that employee is hard to work with. Bosses play a big role in dictating whether employees experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness!) This brings me back to the question of filter.

So far, I’ve focused on the support of values is a primary method of retaining employees. Often separated from values is purpose, which I consider a highly prioritized value manifested as a far-reaching, long-term and relatively tangible goal. A company mission is basically the same thing. The mission of the bread company mentioned above is:

“to give superior service in providing the finest quality baked goods to its valued customers nationwide by utilizing a worker owned and managed cooperative business structure and to strive to use whole grain and organic ingredients, wherever possible, to support sustainable agricultural practices and healthy living.”

This is about something a little bit bigger than just bread. They are expressing several values in it: internally they’re promoting a co-op culture and all that is implied with that, and the far-reaching ones are to support health and the environment. And of course, a good product. In hiring employees, it’s probably useful to look for people who already care about these things. As Paul argues, an entrepreneur is pursuing a purpose that they decided on and will thusly have a lot of ownership in it. As a VC, I would think you need to look closely for an entrepreneur’s integrity behind the mission of the company. Why that product or service? Is that interest reflected in his past somehow?

I also mentioned meaning and impact. Meaning is argued to be an additional psychological need, and I basically agree with this (Andersen, Chen, & Carter, 2000). Seligman (2000) defines meaning as contributing beyond the self. This means that projects that do not ever come to fruition won’t provide much, if any, meaning. In other words, futility is a huge underminer of meaning and seeing impact is enormously important. Adam Grant, a professor at UPenn, has done several studies showing the importance of task significance. One finding comes from a university call center where employees were supposed to spend their time calling up donors, requesting funding. Grant and his colleagues had a scholarship recipient come in and chat with a group of the callers for five minutes. A month later, those callers were spending more than twice as much time on the phone and bringing in more than twice as much funding. This shows an increase in dedication, and likely indicates less future turnover. People need to know that what they do matters.

Lastly, I just want to comment on having any kind of so-called filter at all. When you make a rule like “don’t hire people who have more than six jobs in ten years on their resume,” you are allowing yourself to be mindless. For example, saying “ugh, you always say that” probably indicates that you are no longer really listening to what the other person says… you’re basing your assumptions on what you’ve heard before, and no growth can occur in this scenario. A resume has a person on the other end of it. Each job is a set of experiences for that person, and it is very difficult to make assumptions about them from a piece of paper that is codified to be a coldly-written summary of what they’ve done. It’s a little different than learning who they are.

Paul says that you should hire the best. Hire people who could leave anytime they wanted because they are that good. I definitely agree here. If you are hiring people that could leave anytime and know this, then they are staying for autonomous reasons. Their well-being will be higher for it (swaths of research on autonomous regulation and well-being). Paul mentions in his hiring criteria, he checks to see if people are pursuing their craft outside of being paid for it. This indicates that they probably do what they do because they either find it interesting or care about it. Though, it’s still possible that they do it because they like to compete or want to be the cool guy in a particular community. The best way to know why someone does what they do is to ask them, and to ask them in a way that makes them feel safe and understood. If you want honest answers out of people at interviews, and if you want to see how they will act once they are at the company for a while, you want to make them feel supported and not judged.