Do you feel that loyalty is only about employee’s long stay with the company?
Loyalty is a strong word and holds a lot of importance when it is linked to employee serving a company. An employer will be a proud employer if he has a big work force of loyal people. Most of us feel that employees who stay for long with the company are the loyal employees. But is loyalty only about long stay & what does an employer do to produce increasing loyal work force?
Providing more and more monetary benefits in form of incentives, perks and salaries will be of not much help if we are talking about loyalty. These can only increase their performance. It is not necessary that a high performer is also a loyal employee. A high performer who is motivated with monetary benefits is a non-reliable employee for the organisation as he can be motivated by such benefits and can leave the organisation for higher pay structures. In that case we can not call him a loyal employee.
Loyalty is surely linked to high productivity from employees and their dedication to work because being loyal is directly related to efforts put in by an employee towards increasing its profits or its brand name in the market. Hence loyalty gives us good work force who thinks about and gives respect to his employer for the opportunity extended to them by the employer to learn, earn, grow and give.
Loyalty is an aspect which is less explored by few of the organisations because in the end if organisation is having good performers who are giving the company required revenues then loyalty becomes a less important factor towards the growth. In fact few companies look at it like this that if employees stay long with the company then company might have to provide them with salary raise every next year which may not justify the cost to profit ratio for that particular position in long run. Even if they are thought of being promoted to next level with salary raise not all the employees would fit into that promotion criterion. So they become a burden after sometime. Hence, most of the companies also prefer employees to stay with them for not more than 2-3 years and then leave. The same goes from employee’s side also. They also might not want to stick to a company if they are not getting growth in terms of higher salary or position.
But there are still few companies who look at building personal relation with employees and go beyond the professional limits to make them feel desired and important for the company’s growth. These companies are more focussed towards building loyalty among employees as they feel that they can be an asset to a company in many ways. There are different ways in which they try and build loyal employees such as :
1) Conducting employee engagement activities often where employees are allowed to have fun and avail certain services from company’s side and feel privileged.
2) They also believe in giving employees and their families a feeling of belongingness towards the company by conducting different family functions at offices.
3) There family members are made to feel important by addressing to the valuable support they have given so that the employee could deliver his best.
All this makes the family members to feel special and they also have an attachment towards the company.
Giving a special feeling to an employee & his family members will surely make them stay with a company for a longer time period who will also like to spend more and more time with a caring organisation and will give their best during their stay with the company. So an employee who thinks positively and profitably & delivers in accordance for his organisation can be called as a loyal employee.
Hence we can say that loyalty is not related to employee’s long stay with the company but to his efforts & contribution at work in order to achieve the organisation’s growth as a whole for whatever period he stays with the organization