Revolving Door
Lynn A. Isabella
Is a commonly used metaphor that represents the fluid and continuous movement of individuals in and out of organizations. Imagine a steady stream of people from two directions passing through a spinning door. Their entrance as well as their exit is easy, quick, and relatively unencumbered; individuals are constantly in motion passing through. However, because hiring, training, and retraining individuals is costly, a constant revolving door of personnel has serious financial implications.
Revolving doors can exist in different ways for different reasons. Specific jobs or positions can become known as places where individuals quickly come and go; alternatively, the culture of an organization can come to be known as one where the tenure of people within the company is short. For example, a number of companies have jobs that become known as ‘‘stepping stones’’ within an organization. These are positions through which people rotate on their way somewhere else. One is never expected to remain long; one rarely sees the consequences of actions initiated. At the organizational level, companies can become known as ‘‘revolving door’’ cultures. These are companies who expect (consciously or unconsciously) that employees will remain for short periods of time and then move on. These companies are extremely demanding of people’s time and energies, workloads are heavy, and the atmosphere intense. Such a company may have an unintended (or intended) philosophy of people as expendable resources: use them as long and as hard as one can, then hire another to begin the cycle again.
The revolving door phenomenon can have ethical implications for companies and for the individuals who work in them. For companies, as individuals pass through their doors quickly, so can company secrets, client data, and other proprietary information. Companies as a result often go to great lengths to protect that data. It is not uncommon for employees, especially high level executives, when leaving or being asked to leave, to do so immediately and under guard or to be asked to sign an agreement limiting industry access. At the individual level, the revolving door may represent a constant supply of fresh talent for a company, but at the expense of perhaps unwitting but eager employees, who believe they are being hired into a position of promise.
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