Senior Community

I’ve been told that there was a time in our country when companies valued their employees. When a man or woman would find a job they liked and would continue working there through retirement. I’ve been told that there was a sense of shared loyalty, a “we’ll take care of you if you work hard for us” attitude. I’ve been told about this, and I’ve even experienced this to a certain extent, but I think that mutual loyalty between employer and employee is a thing of the past. With the baby-boomers retired or close to retirement we may be seeing the last vestiges of a dying philosophy.

It seems to me that today employers and employees both have adopted the new practice of every man for himself and ‘survival of the fittest’ attitudes about employment. Employees will leave jobs for other opportunities and employers will let their workers go for seemingly frivolous reasons. It seems unclear to me who started this trend, but both behaviors seem to perpetuate each other. The knowledge that everyone is expendable will only make employees more anxious to leave and the more employees a company has updating their resumes the more ready they will be to hire new people.

Many seem to think that this works out for the benefit of both. Employers get to look for the best people for the job rather than be stuck with a stagnant pool of employees, and employees get to look for the career of their dreams rather than be stuck at a dead end job. To a certain extent, I think that this is true. No one should have to stay working somewhere they hate and if someone just isn’t getting the job done it only makes sense to let them go and hire someone else.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. This is more than just instances where the employment relationship is not working out. I’m talking about people leaving jobs simply for more money rather than asking for a raise, and companies hiring from without rather than promoting from within. Jobs just aren’t viewed as long term things any more in many, many cases.

I think that what we’re seeing is a result of a lack of investment on both sides. I think that employees view their jobs as just jobs and don’t really have any vested interest in the success of a company, and I think that employers feel the same way about their employees, viewing them as worker bees and not really investing in their individual successes. Doesn’t this just end up hurting both parties? Wouldn’t having employees who care about the success of their company make for a more successful company? Wouldn’t working for a company that helped you achieve your personal goals be one you would stay with, even if a more lucrative opportunity came along? Both employers and employees are getting the short end of the stick here, so why do we keep it up?

While I do think that we’re all responsible for the way things have turned out, I think that it is in the employers hands to change this cycle. Once you show your employees that you are invested in them, they will come around to the idea of returning on that investment on their own. This article talks about the value of investing in human capitol for corporations. It says that one of the biggest obstacles that corporations need to overcome is that and investment in the training and development of your employees does not always have a tangible monetary return. It does say, however, that in our fragile economy human resources are more valuable than ever, and are even something that corporations rely on to succeed.

I guess what I’m asking here is, where’s the love? What ever happened to pensions? So many senior citizens worked their long lives for a company only to be tossed to the curb and left to fend for themselves after years of loyal employment. Now we find thousands of seniors struggling to pay for their medications or their medical alarms. What happened to the idea of a “company man”? Someone who was a loyal and hard worker for a company for years. Where did these ideas and attitudes go? I guess the biggest question is are we too far to gone to get them back? I think that we have a lot to gain from a more mutually gainful relationship between employee and employer. I think we can do better than “I do work, you give me a paycheck.” What do you think?