The new employee

As mentioned, there is no sign of this new employee just yet. The proportion of employees who feel free and uncommitted is somewhere between 5% and 15%. A large number of employees would rather stay with their current employers till the end of their careers. Many of them, including younger employees, don’t have any ambition to ever change their jobs.

Why does this new employee not exist yet? One important reason is that the new employee quickly degenerated into a caricature. It was said that ordinary jobs would disappear and that employees would only perform projects in future. The average employee would hop from project to project. For a while now there has been a much-viewed movie on YouTube called ‘did you know’? This movie outlines a vision of the future which is at times intriguing. One of its claims is that in the future employees will have had 14 different employers before they turn 38. This is absolute nonsense. It is completely untrue that in the future careers with companies will be short by definition. It is true that they will be more varied and employees will change their employers somewhat more often during their career, but it won’t be that dramatic. Longer careers in companies will remain the norm, although they will no longer be lifelong careers. Such claims frighten the average employee. The vast majority don’t find it attractive at all to constantly have to to change jobs. By laying it on so thick this vision of the future becomes very unappealing for the average employee and, working to the contrary, puts him off. He becomes conservative and wants to avoid taking risks. He starts thinking about joining the civil service where lifelong careers are still the norm and will remain so in future, albeit less so than at present.

A second reason is that we haven’t really organised our labour market yet to cater for this new employee. Our entire system presupposes the employee who stays with one employer for life. Our social protection, for instance, focuses on avoiding or discouraging dismissal. Social protection still does not take enough account of mobility in the job market, of changing jobs. With us, employees who are dismissed always get a lot of money (the one more than the other) but only in a minority of cases do they get counselling to help them find other work.

It is high time we redefined ‘the new employee’. For such a definition to appeal to a larger group of employees it must be more realistic and less pretentious. We must not go overboard. When we speak of a new employee, two elements are essential:

Firstly, the employee should no longer see his job as a point of departure but rather his career. This means for a start that he or she must learn to look further ahead – say by 5 or so years – when taking certain decisions. It also means thinking a bit more deeply about one’s career from time to time. Transcending the short-term perspective is the first imperative for the new employee.

A second condition is that the employee must learn to keep looking outward during his career. He should ascertain from time to time what his position might be in the external job market. This could lead to another job but it also gives the person in question considerable protection against unexpected dismissal. The person who remains oriented towards the external job market is far better prepared to take the step of moving to a new job.

Only when enough employees have adopted such an attitude could we speak of an open and modern labour market.