While I appreciate the sentiment of a tour of service, I would also like to highlight the asymmmetrical power imbalance of a tour of service. As I understand it, the difference between contractual work and your tour of service is the spirit of the work relationship: a mutual understanding between the employed and the employer.
However, the only person in that relationship that could extend the relationship, or make it permanent, is the employer. This is to the disadvantage of the employee, and for all practical purposes is no different than a time-limited contract for the employee.
Why would it not be possible to have the spirit of the tour of service and still offer full-time employment? No one gives or accepts a full-time position with the anticipation that they will work their until the retire anyways, so I dont understand what advantages this has for the employee. If after two years an employee feels that their position isn’t worthwhile for them, then they can quit, as many do after 4 years regardless of their contract. A company can fire a person, in some countries, for their role being redundant if the work isn’t necessary anymore. In that case a person can file for unemployment, which they could not do under a time-limited contract.
If the logic for the tour of service is due to the role being temporary or having uncertain funding, then I would suggest that the role is both in practice and spirit just a contracting gig, with all of the moral hazards that accompany those hiring practices.
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 CEA’s) is an informal and non-legally binding agreement. The legal structure of employment is unchanged…
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. I’ve iterated on various ways of phrasing this, but haven’t 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, “I expect to feel Z way in 6 months so lets come back in 4 months and see if we are on track.”
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, “I 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 you”, 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 “within” 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, I’m 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 “you must fulfill the whims of your manager” and it’s not obvious to me that this is actually better for job security.
Hi Ben,
While I appreciate the sentiment of a tour of service, I would also like to highlight the asymmmetrical power imbalance of a tour of service. As I understand it, the difference between contractual work and your tour of service is the spirit of the work relationship: a mutual understanding between the employed and the employer.
However, the only person in that relationship that could extend the relationship, or make it permanent, is the employer. This is to the disadvantage of the employee, and for all practical purposes is no different than a time-limited contract for the employee.
Why would it not be possible to have the spirit of the tour of service and still offer full-time employment? No one gives or accepts a full-time position with the anticipation that they will work their until the retire anyways, so I dont understand what advantages this has for the employee. If after two years an employee feels that their position isn’t worthwhile for them, then they can quit, as many do after 4 years regardless of their contract. A company can fire a person, in some countries, for their role being redundant if the work isn’t necessary anymore. In that case a person can file for unemployment, which they could not do under a time-limited contract.
If the logic for the tour of service is due to the role being temporary or having uncertain funding, then I would suggest that the role is both in practice and spirit just a contracting gig, with all of the moral hazards that accompany those hiring practices.
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, “I expect to feel Z way in 6 months so lets come back in 4 months and see if we are on track.”
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, “I 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 you”, 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 “within” 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, I’m 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 “you must fulfill the whims of your manager” and it’s not obvious to me that this is actually better for job security.