Time to Lose

Is anyone else a Masterpiece Theater fan?  I can’t get enough of All Creatures Great and Small, Grantchester, and so many other programs.  Do you know what I also love?  The calming voice of Torstein Hagen, Founder of Viking Cruises, who signals the start of every Masterpiece show with his declaration layered over images of ships and port destinations:

“When you really philosophize about it, there’s only one thing you don’t have enough of. And that’s time. Time is the only truly scare commodity. And when you come to that realization, it’s very important that you spend your time wisely…”

I considered that commercial on the morning of May 1, 2025, as I sat in a ballroom and listened to Michael Phelps speak at the 15th Becker’s Annual Meeting in Chicago.  He posed the question, “How do you define time?” and noted how important time is in swimming. His goals were set in the hundredths of seconds.

How do we define time?  (And no, I don’t mean that song from Rent suggesting we measure a year in sunsets or cups of coffee.  Apologies for the earworm!)

I’ve been a recruiter for many years, and a common metric in our field is “time to fill”, or the time between when a vacancy opens and when a new employee starts.  We labor over that metric and rate departmental success on it.  We use it to demonstrate how difficult a particular market might be, and we back up our expectation-setting conversations with hiring managers with time-to-fill statistics.

I wonder, however, if we’re missing the boat.  Has anyone ever measured “time to lose”?  How long, after an employee is hired, does it take for our organizations to lose them?

This is an uncomfortable idea.

In my talk, Who Do You Say That You Are, I share the following graph that measures the erosion of psychological safety following the hiring of a new employee:

This is 2024 research by Bransby, Kerrissey, and Edmondson, published by Harvard Business Review.  The graph seems to indicate that time-to-lose is approximately 3-5 years.  The authors suggest that the drastic reduction in psychological safety occurs “when the newcomers confront the reality of their new environment, which may differ from expectations, leading to a recalibration of beliefs.”  In other words, they drank the Kool-Aid when they signed on.  Now they see the truth.

How can we improve time-to-lose metrics, other than simply considering them in the first place?  Two things are key:

1. Make sure all stakeholders are accurately representing your organization’s priorities and structure, including methods of compensation and recognition.  Do not promise something that is not reality.  It doesn’t matter if the recruiter and the department chair are selling the same feel-good speech but other employees in the interview process are telling them something else.

   
   

2. Focuses can shift during the first 3-5 years.  Do managers take time to understand their employees’ professional identities AFTER they’ve been at the organization a while?

   
   

   1. The employee’s priorities may have changed.

      
      

      1. They used to be more mission-oriented, but they now have a family and finances are more of a focus.

         
         

      2. They were formerly focused on paying off student loans, but now that that’s done, they’re more mission-driven.

      
      

   2. The organization may also have changed in terms of structuring, leadership, and overall priorities.

A December 2024 Gallup article by Wigert and Tatel published this graph to illustrate how employees are seeking new jobs at the highest rate since 2015 while job satisfaction has also reached an all-time low:

The number one reason they listed for this trend is “rapid organizational change.”  Disruptions could include budget cuts since the employee’s time of hire, team restructuring, or the adding of new job responsibilities.  Not surprisingly, “resetting expectations and priorities” is the top suggested solution in this article.

Every organization is different, but Michael Phelps and Torstein Hagen might have been onto something. 

How do we measure time?  Time to fill is important, but are we considering time to lose?