Hank Li describes himself a “compulsive job-hopper.”
Writing on eFinancialCareers in May this year, Li explains that he quit his first post-graduate job at a Singaporean bank after two years. His next position at a global bank lasted only eight months and at his third job, Li didn’t finish the year.
With three jobs in just under four years, Li, a pseudonym, looks like a loyal employee compared to the typical Googler. The median tenure at the search giant is just 1.1 years which is about half the job tenure of a typical software engineer.
In a tight labor market, that job-hopping looks sensible. Hank Li notes that every time he quit a job, he started his next position at a higher level.
When a rival company will throw more money, a bigger title and a greater responsibility at you if you’ll switch firms, why wouldn’t you take the offer?
Certainly not in the name of loyalty. The days when workers were expected to be faithful to their companies and stay with the same organization from apprenticeship to a retirement on defined benefits are long gone. Employees know that when times are hard, companies become hard-hearted. The first thing they do is cut staff. So when times are good, there’s no reason for employees to show any more loyalty than they’ve learned to expect from their employers.
But will a move to a better position really lead to greater overall happiness? Does job-hopping produce ever increasing career satisfaction or is it only the habit of the perpetually dissatisfied who always believe the grass is greener on the other side of town?
Should you grab the chance when a better offer comes in or should you stay at your current company and invest for long-term loyalty rewards?
One group of researchers has been crunching some data. Wiebke Doden of King’s College in London, Julian Pfrombeck of Columbia University, and Gudela Grote of ETH Zurich conducted two studies into the career satisfaction of employees with an organization-centered orientation and employees with a self-centered career orientation.
The researchers defined the first group as people who consider the organization to be central to their career needs or goals, including job security and internal promotions. They may choose to leave a company if their career needs aren’t met but they see career progress as linear.
They “prioritize loyalty and security and are characterized by low mobility aspirations reflected in progression within the firm’s hierarchy and a continuous increase in status and earnings up until retirement and a positive attitude toward organizational career management.”
These are the people who stick around, expecting a promotion within the company every few years.
The researchers describe employees with “self-centered career orientations” as more independent and proactive. They manage their careers themselves, focus less on job security, and take more personal responsibility for their own career development and employability.
“Self-centered employees may perceive a job change as a successful career self-management behavior in itself,” the researchers say, “because the new job constitutes an immediate improvement compared to the previous one.”
They’re job-hoppers, always looking for the next best offer.
So which group ends up happier?
New Job, Old Problems
In the first study, the researchers distributed surveys to new employees at eight medium-to-large organizations in Switzerland. The surveys were distributed at five time points: on the new employees’ first day; at six weeks; three months; six months; and one year after starting work at the firms.
The survey questions asked the employees to rate their job satisfaction, their intention to look for a new job within the next year and whether they often think about quitting their job. The employees were also asked to rate whether they saw themselves as managing their own careers or whether they saw the organization as managing their careers for them, a measure of self-centered career orientation and organization-centered career orientation.
The researchers found that employees with self-centered career orientations followed a pattern of “hedonic adaptation.” Their level of job satisfaction increased immediately after they started a new job, but that satisfaction then decreased before stabilizing at a lower level by the end of the first year.
The organization-centered employees, on the other hand, began in a similar way. They too enjoyed an initial honeymoon–hangover boost in job satisfaction which declined after three months. But after these employees had been at the company for half a year, their level of job satisfaction rose again.
“This increase in satisfaction may support work experience models,” say the researchers, “suggesting that job satisfaction increases as a result of benefits accrued with tenure, such as loyal working relationships, security, and status within the organization.”
In other words, people who see their careers as something they have to manage by moving onto a new company rarely want to stay in their new job for long. They might feel an initial period of excitement when they start their new position but within as little as half a year, they’re already looking for a new company. People who prefer to stay at the same company find satisfaction in the benefits that come from institutional knowledge, seniority and loyalty rewards.
A second study reinforced the impression of job hoppers as moving from one unhappy position to another. The researchers conducted another survey, focusing their analysis this time on 66 employees who had changed jobs within two years of starting a new position. They asked the employees about their level of job satisfaction and turnover intention at the start of that new job and at points two and three years later.
What they found was that job-hoppers didn’t just start thinking about a new job soon after the excitement of the new company had worn off. The researchers also found that their satisfaction fell quickly and stayed low. While organization-centered employees maintained their job satisfaction over time, the other group quickly became unhappy.
In other words, moving to a new job soon after starting your current one might land you a promotion and it might even win you more money. And it might even make you happy for a few months. But that satisfaction won’t last long. If you tend to keep looking for the next best thing, you tend to be unhappy until you find it—and you’re soon unhappy again.
Staying Happy at Work and Keep Your Workers
There are lessons here for both employers and employees. The researchers warn managers to anticipate a post-honeymoon decline in job satisfaction among people with histories of job-hopping. However excited those new workers might be about their new positions, it won’t be long—and might be as little as six months—before they’re checking the job ads and sending private messages again on LinkedIn.
So employers who want to keep those staff members need to act early to ensure that the desire for something new can be satisfied in-house. They have to show that the current company can provide career development opportunities within the organization and they should aim to foster a sense of security and loyalty, emphasizing upcoming pension benefits, seniority bumps and pay rises, that can form the basis for a long-lasting employment relationship.
“Organizations,” argue the researchers, “can… implement strategies to reintroduce novelty and thus reignite a job satisfaction boost for employees remaining in the same organization.”
Those strategies might include opportunities for training, development, networking events, project work, or job rotation programs. Managers could allow for job-crafting, a flexible approach to work that lets employees change the characteristics of their job to better align with their own personal needs, goals, and skills. Large companies could even offer international postings for key employees with itchy feet and an urge to keep moving.
All of those measures require effort on behalf of the organization. They’ll also increase costs and reduce efficiency so the organization would need to weigh up those expenses against the value that comes from keeping the employee. An easier option, and one that allows the organization to maintain control of the way it defines its work, might simply be to avoid hiring employees with short-term employment histories.
And for employees, too, there’s a warning in the researchers’ findings. The desire to find again the excitement that comes with starting a new job might be addictive but like all addictions, the pleasure is short-lived and the craving soon returns. A better strategy, once life at the new company becomes routine, is to begin looking not for places to leave but for ways to move up within the organization.
Talk to the HR department about promotion tracks. Chat to people in other departments about the work that they do so that you gain a more holistic understanding of the way the organization works. Set yourself a target within the organization, understand what you have to do to hit it, and aim for milestones on the path.
The satisfaction that a new job brings doesn’t have to come only from a new job. If you can find that buzz within the organization, not only will you maintain your level of job satisfaction, you’ll also collect pension and bonus prizes that come organizational loyalty—and you won’t have to hop from one job to another.
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