Employee Loyalty Makes No Sense Anymore - If It Ever Existed at All

Not even employers want employees to stick around

“I will be honest with you, it is cheaper to fire and hire than to train and upskill.”

This is what four CEOs shared with me last weekend during a conversation about employee loyalty. And honestly, while their bluntness made me uncomfortable, what they said made perfect sense. In many cases, it's actually cheaper to fire someone and hire a new employee with the right skills than to invest time and resources into training. Even more striking, all of them said that even if it were more expensive, they wouldn’t hesitate—because what matters most is having the right skills, knowledge, and expertise in their business right now, not months down the line.

I have said it before that the real cost isn’t in hiring or turnover — it’s in the lack of competence that so-called employee loyalty often creates. We focus endlessly on turnover KPIs, but never look at the data on how long-term employment can quietly damage an organisation. My bet? Long-term employees who stay for the wrong reasons are costing us more than high turnover ever did.

Consider this: the pace at which required skills and expertise are evolving has rendered both corporate training and even higher education increasingly obsolete. Organizations can no longer keep up with the constant need to upskill and reskill their workforce. From both a financial and time-efficiency standpoint, hiring for current needs and letting go when those needs change has become a more practical approach. This strategy enables companies to remain agile and adapt more quickly to change.

Loyalty made sense in an era when skill requirements remained relatively stable. Companies could hire employees, train them once, and rely on those skills for years. Any gradual shifts in expertise were manageable with simple, occasional training. But that’s no longer the reality. Today, the pace of change is so rapid that expecting employees to fully reskill themselves every 3–5 years is neither practical nor sustainable.

We might not like it, but it is happening even with highly skilled real jobs like engineering and medicine and I don’t think that we can stop this. BUT, if we cannot stop this we must ask the question, how does it impact corporations? It impacts the way we:

• Hire & fire - fast & skill-based. We fire you for not having the skill we need and hire you for having the skill we need.

• Measure the value of employees - It will be skill-based and it will mean that finally you can GET RID OF YOUR TURNOVER KPI!

If there’s one thing I’m completely allergic to in HR, it’s the turnover KPI. Can someone please explain why we’re clinging to Melissa—just because she’s been here for five years? I’ve never once missed a departed employee. Sure, there’s a moment of “oh no” when someone exits, but then—like clockwork—someone else steps in and does the same job, sometimes even better. Two weeks later we don’t even think about the person. So why are we still held hostage by this outdated metric?

But here’s the thing—progressive companies don’t seem to be held hostage by turnover. In fact, some of them actively embrace it. And if I’m honest, we never really did much to stop turnover either. We just liked talking about the KPI. Maybe that’s because, deep down, we knew the truth: people coming and going is not only natural—it can actually be a good thing.

Plus, let’s face it—we’ve never been able to prove the real cost of turnover. Those numbers? Mostly guesswork. And we know it. That’s probably why we don’t take real action. Turnover is just part of the cost of doing business. Additionally, loyalty can harm not only the company but also its employees in various ways.

Maybe the damage it does outweighs the pros and we don't even think about it. So let's look at it from the employees' and employers' point of view.

Employees:

• It can hurt your career by slowing your growth or keeping you on a predefined path. For years, I proudly said I had no regrets—until last year. Now, I carry one: staying with the same company for over 16 years. Do I love Accor? With all my heart. They gave me incredible opportunities—different roles, different countries, the freedom to grow. But in hindsight, staying that long held me back. It fit my nature—loyalty and steady progress—but I can't shake the feeling that I limited myself by seeing only one industry. I'm correcting that now.

• It can keep you miserable under false belief. I know so many GMs who are unhappy, burnt out, or simply done with their roles. Yet they stay, clinging to "seniority." When I ask what that means, they shrug—because it means nothing. Length of service doesn’t give you leverage. It’s a comforting illusion people use to justify staying in jobs that no longer serve them. These GMs? They’re treated no differently than anyone else.

• Your salary growth will be slow. The data is clear: if you stay too long, your income growth slows—dramatically.

• Your knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking will be stagnant. Your knowledge and skills plateau too. You might feel like you're learning, but it’s really just adapting. You know the system so well that true learning stops. There are no fresh challenges, no exposure to new tools, ideas, or ways of thinking.

• You will develop a tunnel vision. That familiar, comfortable environment becomes your world—and you stop seeing what’s possible outside. In just nine months outside hospitality, I’ve discovered an entirely new universe I didn’t know existed. So if someone tells you, “There’s nothing better out there,” “Leaving would ruin your career,” or “Just wait, your promotion will come eventually…”—RUN. That’s not a promise. That’s the tunnel talking.

Employers:

• Inbred competence is real. When you rely too heavily on long-tenured employees without injecting new talent, ideas, and skills, you maintain the status quo—and that’s a fast track to losing ground against competitors. Loyalty at the strategic level can quietly kill innovation, agility, and the ability to pivot. And let’s be honest—it also clashes with your shiny “diversity and inclusion” slogans. 🙂

• You might be rewarding the wrong thing. Loyalty often becomes the default value when an employee's actual contribution is hard to measure. Ask yourself honestly: what value has this person brought over the past 25 years? In many cases, the answer is “not much.” Yet the narrative becomes, “We value loyalty.”

  But let’s call it what it often is: long tenure with little impact. Is that what we want to celebrate? We’ve all worked with that one person everyone’s quietly waiting to retire. They’re not sticking around out of loyalty—they’re still there because no one else is hiring them.

• You’re blocking your talent pipeline and bleeding money. High turnover isn’t always a problem—it can be a gift. It creates space for fresh talent, new skills, and the right people in the right roles. The real cost isn’t recruitment—it’s losing high-potential talent because there’s nowhere for them to go. Compare that to the price of keeping roles filled with the wrong fit, and the numbers speak for themselves.

Turnover doesn’t cost you nearly as much as stagnation or skill shortage does so let that KPI die! Before I do because of it.

Here is a specific example why you must hire for skill. I loved how that poor girl was proven wrong very quickly:

Employee Loyalty is Misunderstood & Overrated!