Problem with policies like this is that it creates zero employee loyalty. You will not feel bad about leaving them at a time which hurts them because you know they would never have your back. Thus you will not have theirs either.
Japanese managers have remarked on this problem in the US when hiring. You cannot easily invest in employees in the US. Investing in training reduce the amount of salary you are able to pay, so people leave as soon as they have training for a better paid job which doesn’t offer training.
Of course Japan is perhaps a bit extreme in this area but as a Scandinavia I have observed the same problem with fellow Scandinavians working in the US. Many remake on the natural loyalty you have been raised with slowly evaporating under US work conditions.
My company had a change of heart a couple of years ago and decided that they "care about people" and wanted to invest in them and such and everyone was valuable..if they sucked at their current position we just had to find them another one. What's happe ned is that productivity has been decpopled from pay. There is a minority of people that do nothing and get paid and it has become the bane of my existence. They wont move because they are comfortable and we can't get rid of them, so I have to Jedi mind tick micro manage them into doing shit. People suck one way or the other =\.
Interesting, you're claiming that Scandinavians that go working in US & come back have more US attitude, and Scandinavia in general is more towards Japan?
Currently working in Japan, and being from Scandinavia I can barely see the resemblance. I've only worked at startups & briefly in a public research Institute here, So sure maybe at big corporations there might be resemblance with the trainee-programs vs new-grad shukatsu system of Japan, but that's about it and afaik that's same in US.
Friends from Uni in Scandinavia didn't really show any "employee loyalty"; it correlated with the size of the company, and inverse correlation with age.
Once upon a time a colleague went to work for another company because of the incredibly higher paycheck. When i talked to her six months later she told me she didn't like the job at all, but it paid well.
Her manager became pretty aggressive when she was one minute late for work only once. Only then she started noticing people were gone from the building within 30 seconds of the end of their shift. The job purely became a money thing. Nobody cared for each other. Just be on on time for your shift and get the hell out when your shift ended so you couldn't get forced into unpaid overtime by some manager. Zero happiness for eight hours a day.
I experienced this at a couple places. At one in particular I was one of the many workers who clashed with an absolutely incompetent PM. This piece of ... even mobbed me during meetings, while pushing for me to join another project (with help from other execs in the company) because customers knew me and wanted me. That project was really interesting and really well paid, also at that company I made friends with a lot of people, some of them I still see today after over 20 years, but if I accepted I would send the message that it was ok to treat me as garbage like that. The indecision was literally ruining my health: I spent nearly 20 days at home with psychosomatic hemorrhoids, then one day I finally had the flash. "I quit - period". After I took that decision, in less than two days the hemorrhoids were gone. I went back to the workplace, gave them the 2 week notice and finished my duties. They did everything to convince me. No way.
I spent the last evening there crying while hugging all the friends I had made there, although some already left for similar reasons; I didn't even have any job offers (not a big problem as it was well before the first dot com bust) but I didn't care: that was the best thing I could do.
As for why a company would employ an incompetent PM like that? Because he was a shark, one of those useful manipulative figures who can easily tell lies to customers or push people into resigning without thinking twice.
One day, some time after quitting, I paid visit to that company to see old friends and have lunch with them. Just guess who was the first person to call my name loudly, approach me with a huge fake smile and hug me. Yup, it was him. They're more common than we could think; if you have one nearby, be very careful.
Japanese managers have remarked on this problem in the US when hiring. You cannot easily invest in employees in the US. Investing in training reduce the amount of salary you are able to pay, so people leave as soon as they have training for a better paid job which doesn’t offer training.
Of course Japan is perhaps a bit extreme in this area but as a Scandinavia I have observed the same problem with fellow Scandinavians working in the US. Many remake on the natural loyalty you have been raised with slowly evaporating under US work conditions.