Why I want my employees to leave their jobs

1 out of 5 of my employees won't be in their roles next year. And I couldn't be happier.

Millennial job hopping has understandably created a lot of hand-wringing in the HR world. According to LinkedIn data, Millennials now expect to change their job every 2.5 years -- double the rate of their Gen X predecessors. These days, candidates aren't just switching jobs, they're often switching entire industries.

But what if this isn't a cause for alarm? What if it's actually a strategic advantage for businesses?

Traditionally, employee retention -- the ability to retain staff -- has been considered one of the hallmarks of company health. I'd argue that's still the case. But focusing blindly on retention actually misses the bigger picture. The metric we should be tracking is what I call people movement: the oxygen pulsing through a business.

What is people movement? To be clear, I'm not talking about churn or turnover: losing employees altogether is rarely a good thing. Instead, people movement encompasses all the internal role changes that happen within an organization.

Part of this will be promotions. But an even more critical piece is lateral and diagonal movements to staff to different teams and departments.

Contrary to accepted wisdom, this kind of people movement isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's vital to organizational health. Put simply: moving people out of their current roles is as important as keeping people in their roles.

This isn't lip service.

We made it a company-wide goal - right alongside revenue targets -- to ensure that 20 percent of our employees, or around 200 people in total, aren't in the same seat by the end of 2017. It's an open declaration to managers and staff alike that shifting roles is part of our culture and encouraged, not suppressed. 

For so many companies, the opposite is true: you are, in no certain terms, expected to "do your time" before moving over or moving up. I understand this thinking. Managers make an investment in training and expect to see a return on that. But the world is moving too fast for this model, and it's time we evolved. Here's why.

The two-way street of people movement
For the right employees, an open people-movement policy is a boon: the chance to learn new skills, and fast, quickly expanding their professional toolkit and building a stronger resume.

How important is this to employees today? 65% of Millenials say that personal development is the most important factor on the job, according to a UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School study.

In my company, we've seen salespeople transition to product management and marketing specialists shift to corporate development. Talented individuals who enter the company with one skillset are able to level up and acquire expertise in a whole new area.

Rather than locking them into one role-- love it or leave it -- we've given them routes to learn and grow with the company, leading to happier, more fulfilled employees.

Meanwhile, the benefits to the company as a whole of embracing people movement are multiple and cascading. Lateral movement is a powerful way to break down corporate silos and diffuse institutional know-how throughout the organization.

Not to mention, the reality that employees are continually on the move obliges a company to hire smarter and to train faster, maximizing return in a short time span.

Deeper still, this kind of flux is a powerful way to sustain startup energy and spirit as a company scales. After all, one incentive that attracts highly talented recruits to small startups is the promise of wearing multiple hats. Bug this kind of role fluidity tends to diminish as a company grows and jobs become more specialized.

Lost in the process is the enthusiasm and creativity that make the scrappy startup environment so special. People movement reignites that flame.

Ultimately, the trickle down effects of enabling people movement are better retention and better recruitment, i.e, the exact goals that keep all HR teams up at night. Smart employees want to work at a company where they know they can learn and grow.

And A-players stick around longer when they're continually challenged.

So how do you actually pull off a people movement program?
All this sounds great, but, as with any paradigm shift, this one definitely takes some getting used to. After all, actively encouraging your best and brightest employees to move on goes against everything managers are traditionally taught.

You invest energy to bring people up to speed, only to see them swooped up by another department, leaving you with a new vacancy to fill.

Internally, we've found that people movement doesn't work without a clear perspective shift, reimagining "manager" as mentor, champion and educator. Turnover, in this formulation, is an indicator of success, not failure.

It's not a sign that employees don't want to work with you; it's a sign that you've done an exceptional job as manager.

This holds especially true for departments that attract high levels of junior talent. At our company, that means the sales and customer success department. These teams have their own mandate to fulfill, of course, but they've embraced the idea that they're also an invaluable talent funnel for the rest of the organization.

Rather than trying to lock their best people into a single career track, managers have learned to actively steer them to roles throughout the the company.

It's also critical to point out that people movement is not about fast-track promotions or rocketing people into higher pay grades. This only bloats management and inflates budgets, with no real performance boost. Instead, it relies on employees actively stretching to new roles, often in different departments.

But interdepartmental walls can be intimidatingly high: How's an employee supposed to know what goes on in other departments, let alone what roles you need to be filled?

I've found that both informal and formal initiatives are key. On the informal end, employees across the company get together every Friday afternoon when we open our traps for a round of drinks. It's not rocket science, but it gets people outside their departmental bubble.

Better still, we've got a robust #randomcoffee program. Employees sign up to be paired with a random peer, blind-date style, and then get to know one another over a coffee.

Our most effective tool is something we call the "stretch program," which gives team members a formal way to try on roles in another department. Stretch employees spend one day a week on their adopted team, and the remaining time in their official role. Both managers must sign off on the assignment, and only people excelling in their current role are eligible.

At the end of the trial, the fit is evaluated: If everyone's on board the staffer can make the jump full time.

People movement as a company goal takes some getting used to. It can be a challenge to wrap your head around the idea that helping people leave their roles -- rather than encouraging them to stay put -- is actually best for the health of a business.

This isn't HR hysteria: a full two-thirds of Millennials say they plan to leave their jobs in 2020. At Hootsuite, we saw this happen too many times: talented, otherwise happy employees jumping ship not because of pay or working conditions or problems but simply because they wanted a new challenge. So we found a way to help them change roles without changing employers...and it seems to be working.