Why do we think employee “loyalty” is such a complicated topic? It’s not.

Employee loyalty is a variation on the idea of ‘The Gold Watch Era.’ Basically, back in the day — maybe your generation, or maybe your parents or grandparents — people tended (everyone is obviously unique in some respect) to work at companies for a longer period of time and potentially even retire at those companies, thus earning a Gold Watch. That was the model. It’s not the model anymore. Notions of employee loyalty have shifted about a dozen different times in the past 10 years alone — which has a lot of implications for how we approach job-hopping, for example.

Now, before we go too overboard on the concept of employee loyalty, let’s toss out a quick caveat. As of January 2014, an average U.S. worker lasted 4.6 years on a job. In 1983, that tenure was 3.5 years. So we’ve actually increased base employee loyalty in the United States in the past 30–35 years. And, while there are a lot of caveats between 1963 employee loyalty data and 2014 employee loyalty data, the base number is exactly the same — 4.6 years on a job. (People often tweet that it was 22.5 years on a job in 1960, which is absolutely preposterous and part of the reason you need to use a ‘trust but verify’ approach on social media.)

So, where do we stand in reality with the whole concept of employee loyalty?