Your people are staying longer. Use this extra time to plan better.

Your people are staying longer than they did 2 years ago

Apparently, we’re staying put. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just released its latest employee tenure numbers, and the median American worker has now been with their employer for 4.1 years. Two years ago, it was 3.9.

That doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but another number caught my attention: only 20.6% of workers had been with their employer for a year or less, down from 22.2% in 2024. In other words, there’s a little less movement happening. And if you run a business, I think that matters for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the 0.2-year increase everyone will put in the headline.

The employee you already have may be more valuable than the one you’re trying to hire

There are a lot of reasons people stay in jobs longer. Maybe they love where they work. Maybe the job market feels uncertain. Maybe they aren’t seeing anything better. The BLS data doesn’t tell us why. But it does tell us people aren’t moving around quite as much, and for a business owner, that should make you look a little differently at the people who are already there.

Especially the ones who know things nobody realizes they know. You know that employee: the one everyone asks when a weird order comes through, who knows why you stopped using that vendor three years ago, who can fix the spreadsheet nobody else understands, or who knows which customer needs to be handled a certain way because “there was an issue once.”

None of that is in their job description, and most of it probably isn’t written down anywhere. That’s the part of this BLS report I actually care about.

Tenure looks very different depending on who you employ

The overall median is 4.1 years, but averages across the entire U.S. workforce aren’t particularly useful when you’re running one company. Workers ages 25 to 34 have a median tenure of 3 years. For workers ages 55 to 64, it’s 9.6 years. More than half of workers ages 60 to 64 have already been with their current employer for at least 10 years.

Industry matters too. Median tenure is 5.0 years in financial activities and 4.9 years in manufacturing and information. In leisure and hospitality, it’s only 2.4 years. Food preparation and serving occupations come in at 2.2.

So if you own a restaurant and feel like you’re constantly training someone new, you’re operating in a completely different reality than a manufacturer with employees who may stick around for five years. But every business has some version of the same problem: eventually, somebody leaves. And when they do, you find out very quickly whether their knowledge belonged to the company or just lived in their head.

I would do this before writing another job posting

Find the person who has been with your company the longest and ask them: “What do you know how to do here that would be a problem if you weren’t here tomorrow?”

Then listen.

Have them walk you through one of those things. Record the conversation, transcribe it, and drop the transcript into ChatGPT or Claude. Ask it to turn the conversation into a first draft of an SOP. Is the first draft going to be perfect? Absolutely not. But you’ll have something, and “something we can improve” is infinitely better than discovering six months from now that the only person who knew the process left with two weeks’ notice.

This is also one of my favorite uses of AI for small businesses because it’s incredibly boring. I mean that as a compliment. It isn’t an AI agent running your company. It isn’t a flashy chatbot. Nobody needs an “AI transformation strategy.” It’s using a tool to take information that currently exists in someone’s head and turn it into something the rest of the business can actually use. That is useful.

Then look at your own tenure numbers

You don’t need a fancy HR system for this. Put your current employees in a spreadsheet with their start dates and calculate the median. Then look at who has been there the longest, who has been there the shortest, and where people tend to leave. Six months? Eighteen months? Three years?

If your industry tends to keep people for four years and you’re consistently losing them after 14 months, that’s more useful information than the national 4.1-year number. Now you have something to investigate. Maybe it’s compensation. Maybe it’s the manager. Maybe the job they were hired to do slowly turned into three jobs. Maybe your onboarding consists of, “Here’s your login. Sarah will show you everything.” I have seen enough businesses operate this way to know that last one is not hypothetical.

And please stop calling the first week “onboarding”

Hiring someone is expensive enough. Making them spend their first few days completing paperwork, getting passwords, and sitting through introductions isn’t onboarding. That’s administration.

A new employee should know pretty quickly who to go to when they’re stuck, what good performance actually looks like, what they’re supposed to own, and what they should be able to do without help in 30, 60, and 90 days. You would be amazed how many people go months in a role without having clear answers to those questions. Then leadership wonders why they’re struggling.

The interesting part isn’t that tenure went from 3.9 to 4.1 years

It’s what you do while those people are still sitting inside your business. Every month somebody works for you, they’re accumulating knowledge: customer history, workarounds, vendor relationships, processes, judgment, and tiny decisions that aren’t documented because nobody thinks they’re important enough to document.

Until the person leaves.

So yes, people are staying a little longer. Use the extra time. Find out what your people know before you’re forced to find out what they knew.

And if you’re reading this thinking, I don’t even know where I’d start documenting all of this, that’s exactly the kind of thing we work through in my AI workshops: using tools like ChatGPT and Claude for the boring, useful work that actually makes a business easier to run.