Thanks Charlie! If I understand your concern correctly, this is a misunderstanding of the approach. To quote the post
Note that the Tour of Service (both in the original version and CEAâs) is an informal and non-legally binding agreement. The legal structure of employment is unchangedâŚ
Like any other unusual hiring practice, people sometimes get confused. A decent fraction of our candidates think that a tour of service means that we are only hiring them for a limited-term engagement, and they worry about their job security. Iâve iterated on various ways of phrasing this, but havenât found anything that completely works.
If you have thoughts about how to phrase things so that this misunderstanding is prevented in the future, I would appreciate them!
Thanks for the clarification! I am sorry i misunderstood your position. If I reflect on how I think I misunderstood the idea myself, I think its because I see a full time job as a type of relationship. Typically in a relationship there are not goals to meet or timeframes; I have never told a girlfriend, âI expect to feel Z way in 6 months so lets come back in 4 months and see if we are on track.â
Thats a dramatic comparison, but the dynamic is still a little skewed between me and the other person in the relationship in this situation. If I was friends with someone and they told me, âI like you, and I think we could be even better friends in 2 years if you do X,Y, Z, so lets come back to this in 1 year and see where you stand. Dont worry, this wont necessarily affect our friendship, its just something I could expect from youâ, then I would struggle to see how failing at improving our relationship in this particular way would not negatively effect our relationship regardless of what you say.
To try to explain it another way, in the example above we are tying goals to the relationship, not setting goals âwithinâ the relationship. The relationship becomes dependent on the goals.
This if of course also very normal in work, your job is very dependent on your performance, but I think framing it in this way can just have a strong interpersonal effect that I would struggle to wrap my head around. It is important for people to feel that they are good enough as they are, not just good enough as their last piece of work.
Saying that, I think goals are great and I love ambitious multiyear goals to keep people aligned and motivated. I think having a project as the primary framework for looking at the employment relationship can make the relationship more angsty than it needs to be.
Of course all of the nuances here could just be a language problem, and we are all working in the same spirit :) In fact, when you first said tours of service I thought of the management trainee programs larger corporations have where you try different departments and geographies in a 2 or 3 year period.
To be honest, Iâm still a bit confused about how this works. Is it correct to me that if the employee does not fulfill the Service Objectives, this will be practically (though not legally as the US usually has at-will employment) be seen as grounds for termination? If so, then to me it does feel like less job security than most jobs in-practice have, though maybe a) legally this is not true, and b) normatively the standard advice is that orgs should be more willing to fire than they in practice have.
Hmm, I think the question of whether employees should have objective requirements is somewhat orthogonal from the question of whether they should have a tour of service. For example, many salespeople have sales quotas, despite not being on a tour of service.
That being said: the alternative to having objective requirements is something like âyou must fulfill the whims of your managerâ and itâs not obvious to me that this is actually better for job security.
Thanks Charlie! If I understand your concern correctly, this is a misunderstanding of the approach. To quote the post
If you have thoughts about how to phrase things so that this misunderstanding is prevented in the future, I would appreciate them!
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the clarification! I am sorry i misunderstood your position. If I reflect on how I think I misunderstood the idea myself, I think its because I see a full time job as a type of relationship. Typically in a relationship there are not goals to meet or timeframes; I have never told a girlfriend, âI expect to feel Z way in 6 months so lets come back in 4 months and see if we are on track.â
Thats a dramatic comparison, but the dynamic is still a little skewed between me and the other person in the relationship in this situation. If I was friends with someone and they told me, âI like you, and I think we could be even better friends in 2 years if you do X,Y, Z, so lets come back to this in 1 year and see where you stand. Dont worry, this wont necessarily affect our friendship, its just something I could expect from youâ, then I would struggle to see how failing at improving our relationship in this particular way would not negatively effect our relationship regardless of what you say.
To try to explain it another way, in the example above we are tying goals to the relationship, not setting goals âwithinâ the relationship. The relationship becomes dependent on the goals.
This if of course also very normal in work, your job is very dependent on your performance, but I think framing it in this way can just have a strong interpersonal effect that I would struggle to wrap my head around. It is important for people to feel that they are good enough as they are, not just good enough as their last piece of work.
Saying that, I think goals are great and I love ambitious multiyear goals to keep people aligned and motivated. I think having a project as the primary framework for looking at the employment relationship can make the relationship more angsty than it needs to be.
Of course all of the nuances here could just be a language problem, and we are all working in the same spirit :) In fact, when you first said tours of service I thought of the management trainee programs larger corporations have where you try different departments and geographies in a 2 or 3 year period.
To be honest, Iâm still a bit confused about how this works. Is it correct to me that if the employee does not fulfill the Service Objectives, this will be practically (though not legally as the US usually has at-will employment) be seen as grounds for termination? If so, then to me it does feel like less job security than most jobs in-practice have, though maybe a) legally this is not true, and b) normatively the standard advice is that orgs should be more willing to fire than they in practice have.
Hmm, I think the question of whether employees should have objective requirements is somewhat orthogonal from the question of whether they should have a tour of service. For example, many salespeople have sales quotas, despite not being on a tour of service.
That being said: the alternative to having objective requirements is something like âyou must fulfill the whims of your managerâ and itâs not obvious to me that this is actually better for job security.