You can learn plenty from a simple employee tenure chart

Count of employees by years of tenure. Quite possibly the simplest workforce metric, (can we even call it a 'metric?'. I guess), that exists. And since it is so simple, really it is just counting up the number of employees at different levels of tenure like 1 year, 2 years, more than 10 years, etc., it probably can't tell us all that much about the conditions or capabilities of a large workforce right?

Well maybe this simple metric can tell us a little more than we think. Take a look at the data below, and before you skip ahead to the rest of the post to see where the data is drawn from, ask yourself what this simple data set might say or at least suggest about the organization in question:

EXPERIENCE	NUMBER
First year	10
Second year	13
Third year	1
Fourth year	0
Fifth year	1
6-9 years	21
10-15 years	38
16-20 years	27
21-27 years	10
Source: (see below)

So what can we discern from the data above, on the tenure counts of a group of employees that do pretty much the same job inside a mid-sized organization?

Obviously there is a visible 'gap' in experience levels across this group - there is a huge cluster of the total of 121 employees in the group (about 61%) having more than 10 years experience and another smaller, but not insignificant grouping having between 1 and 2 years experience, (about 20%). But in between these clusters at the extremes of experience? Not many employees at all. In fact there are only 2 out of 121 employees having between 3 and 5 years experience on the job - often the 'sweet spot' for proficiency in many roles, but more on that in a second.

What might we then deduce about the potential issues that might face any organization, (and again, we will get to which specific organization data set represents soon), with this kind of 'hollowed-out' tenure distribution?

I can think of at least three things, and I promise I am not trying to allow my knowledge of who this organization is to reach these observations:

1. Something in this organization's recruiting/onboarding/mentoring/early development for new employees is not working. To have effectively about zero staff in the 3 - 5 years of experience cohort says you either are bringing the wrong type of people into the role, or are failing to get them up to speed to the point where they are succeeding within 3 years. The chart, simple as it is, can't tell us what exactly is wrong, but that certainly something is wrong.

2. Although this is just a tenure chart, and not an 'age' chart, it doesn't require too much of a stretch to conclude that this organization is going to face a pretty serious issue with older workers either retiring or with them simply unable to perform in the role at a high level once they hit a certain age. There are pretty significant physical and fitness requirements for this role, making it not the kind of job that most people can continue in much past say 60 or so. This lack of balance in experience with the heavy skew towards 10 and 15 year plus employees is going to present acute issues in the next 3 - 5 years (and possibly beyond).

3. An organization with this kind of tenure distribution probably has not kept up from a talent management and recruiting perspective with the increasing demands of the role. Like most jobs, the one held by the folks in this chart has become more complex in the last few years, has more scrutiny and pressure placed upon the people in the role, and the employees have more at stake in terms of money and prestige for the organization that employs them. In a nutshell, this job, while being around for about 100 years or so, has in the last 10 or so gotten much, much harder. And the 'gap' in the talent pipeline shows us that recruiting, development, and mentoring efforts have not kept up. Entire new classes of new hires are gone inside if 5 years.

Ok, so who is this organization/group of employees who are reflected in the above chart?

No one but the National Football League's on-field officials - the 'Zebras' that officiate and adjudicate the action on the fields of America's most popular professional sports league, the NFL.

And increasingly, these on-field officials are in the news for all the wrong reasons - missed calls, bad calls, failure to recognize clearly concussed and barely vertical players after they are smashed in the head, and so on. This group of employees, as a group, have been performing poorly for some time now. And the talent pipeline as we see above does not indicate that things are about to get any better anytime soon.

The big lessons for the rest of us?

Pay attention to tenure. Sure, it is not the only or even the most important simple metric to think about. But if it takes 3 or 4 or 5 years for someone to really become expert at the job, and you have hardly any employees in those buckets, then you are going to have organizational performance issues. You will have too many folks on the downslope of their capability and too many who have not yet figured out what the heck is going on. And not enough folks heading up towards their peak.

You are not always recruiting, developing, mentoring, and retaining to ensure high performance this week - sometimes you are doing all of those things to ensure high performance four years from now.

And football is still dumb.