There’s a weird disconnect in how we talk about jobs. On the one hand, it’s received wisdom that people will have many different jobs over the course of their careers (12–15 is the range normally cited). Average job tenure has been on a steady decline since at least 2010, and the most recent US BLS survey* found that average work tenure has fallen below five years overall, and to 2.8 years for 25-34 year olds.

But in too many organizations, employers and employees alike tend to default to an outdated jobs-for-life framing. Employees feel like it’s verboten to talk about moving on, and don’t raise the topic until they tender a resignation letter with two or three weeks’ notice. Employers rarely provide advance notice about the organization changing direction and needing different skillsets, and they certainly never signal changing financial conditions until the layoffs have happened.

This status quo doesn’t serve anyone well. For employers, receiving two-to-three weeks’ notice is not nearly enough time to find and train someone to backfill a role. Employers are left scrambling, as are the teammates who have to cover on the now-shorthanded team. For employees, termination of employment comes without time to bolster savings, re-calibrate household spending choices, or job-hunt from a position of strength. (Ex-)employees are likewise scrambling, needing to come up with a new plan on short notice and often under great stress.

The Status Quo for Ending Jobs

When it comes to employee-initiated departures, you do see workplaces where the status quo is shifting. In these organizations, there is a lot of open and transparent communication about long-term career and life ambitions that extend beyond the current organization, and mutual trust that you won’t be penalized if you tell your boss you’re thinking of moving on. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of manager training, and a lot of unlearning of old mental models to create that kind of culture. Even in those cases, there tends to be radio silence when it comes to interviewing and accepting a specific new role. But if an organization prioritizes creating a culture of trust and transparency around career progression and outside opportunities, you actually can get to a place where moving on is seen and as a natural and healthy part of the employee lifecycle, and the employer doesn’t focus on retention so much as proactive management of inevitable staff turnover.

When we look to employer-initiated departures†, it’s a different story. Outside explicit fixed-term contracts, it’s rare indeed for an employer to talk about a job having a shelf life‡. Instead, we label jobs as being “permanent” full-time, while knowing they can be terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason at all. Employers don’t try to communicate clearly how or when a job might end, but instead focus their energies (and paperwork) to limiting costs and legal risk§ in the (not unlikely) event they need to terminate employment.

It seems to me that this approach is suboptimal on several fronts:

• It disproportionately disadvantages anyone who is less familiar with corporate environments (typically employees who are younger, racialized, or working in lower-skill, non-union jobs) and therefore aren’t as well-equipped to navigate employment and termination negotiations.
• It implicitly reinforces the notion that employers expect you to stay forever, and in that way undermines any organizational efforts to create more open and transparent conversations around career progression outside the organization.
• It ignores the fact that many employees (especially younger ones) actively prefer jobs with 2–3 year tenures and would choose to take on an assignment with a fixed horizon over one with an indeterminate length.
• The absence of clear communications about how and why jobs might end compounds the uncertainty and fear around job loss. It also leaves an explanatory vacuum, which people who have lost their jobs are prone to filling in with their own deficiencies. As a result, job loss is more emotionally fraught and more bruising to self-confidence than it needs to be.

Setting new expectations for offboarding

Here is how we would love to communicate expected role tenure with new hires, right in their employment agreement.

We would love to have language like that because it helps set the right expectations for the employment relationship. It’s clear and reciprocal, and also helps the new hire understand their rights. The only problem is it would cause any lawyer in a 10-mile radius to break into hives, because it exposes the company to too much risk in too many situations. The employer might still have informal conversations that convey the gist, but legal counsel will strenuously recommend new employees don’t get the clarity and peace of mind that comes from a written agreement that outlines what will happen in case of job loss.

None of us at Workomics are lawyers, nor do we play one on TV, but we do think this is a problem. In other types of business agreements, the norm is to go into great detail about how and under what circumstances the arrangement might end. And in fact, when there is a more equal balance of power between employee and employer, we do see explicit agreements about compensation when a job ends. When employees gain power through a union, they negotiate contracts (like this one) with clear entitlement to generous separation payments||. When employees gain power by rising to executive-level roles, they typically negotiate severance clauses, specifying very generous compensation. We just deny those protections to the powerless, who need them more.

Changing this status quo is no easy thing. Probably, the existing legal-regulatory framework needs to be completely overhauled to be more reflective of modern work. But also employers need to recalibrate how they think about severance obligations, and employees need to educate themselves on their entitlements, and/or join unions that negotiate on their behalf. But it’s a sea change that’s needed, if we want fairness and transparency in how companies employ workers.