BUILDING EMPLOYEE LOYALTY

by Terrie Lynn Bittner

Employee turnover is very expensive, and many employers long for the days when a young person started with a company right out of high school or college and stayed until he got his gold watch and pension at retirement. Those days disappeared long ago, and today, employees are usually watching out for the next opportunity, sometimes searching for it on the company’s computer while on the clock. What went wrong and how can employers stop the constant flow of employees in and out of the company? How do companies create deep loyalty and commitment to their firm.

Reasons for Turnover

There are several reasons for the disappearance of company loyalty. Ambition is one cause. Employees are seeking the best job under the best conditions in our difficult times. A new job offers hope that life will improve. Another reason is that many companies have stopped being loyal to their employees. They want their staff to stay, but they don’t provide an equal commitment to keeping their employees. Employment-at-will laws make it very easy for an employer to remove an employee for any reason at all, and when staff members feel insecure, they move on in order to avoid unemployment.

Two things must happen for a company to be able to brag that it has minimal turnover, which is a selling point in attracting quality employees. First, a company must find the best employees available, using realistic and sensible guidelines for qualifications. Second, the company must create an environment that is reassuring, challenging and community-based so that employees want to stay. Because companies must overcome the impression that everyone is expendable and that companies don’t care about their employees, they must expend exceptional effort to build loyalty. Hiring is dealt with in an upcoming article. In this article, we will focus on creating an environment that promotes loyalty.

Five Steps to Building Employee Loyalty

Following are five tips for building loyalty:

1. Understand that employees see themselves as the hard workers who build wealth for others. They see upper management as people who gain wealth at the expense of the ground floor employees. They often see their jobs as much more demanding and tiring than are the jobs of those driving expensive cars and living in elegant homes, and they may resent this perception that they are poor so someone else can be rich. Certainly, you can argue otherwise, but your perceptions will not change the beliefs of others, and you can only work within their reality. One way to overcome this problem is to pay your employees as much as you can afford to do so, at least a little over the average and be generous in benefit cost and coverage. This prevents them from leaving because of money, and helps to create a message of appreciation and understanding. Be sure employees know, without delivering constant lectures that sound condescending, that their pay is higher than average because the company is so appreciative of their efforts. Although being able to attract better employees is a benefit of better pay, your primary purpose should be to show appreciation for your staff.

2. Respect the knowledge and skills of your staff. Everyone wants to feel important. A person who works every day at a certain task feels he is the expert at the task. He will justifiably be upset if someone who spends his days in an office, never venturing onto the floor, tries to make changes to his little kingdom. When you want to make ground floor changes, consult the experts—those who have to live with your decisions. Although you make the final decisions, show them that their input and expertise is valued and critical. To make this work, you must truly consider their preferences, and not make changes to show your power or because you think you know best. Make your employees feel important, skilled, and intelligent to ensure their loyalty.

3. Reduce management-caused turnover. Often, when a company isn’t doing well, top managers begin seeking someone to blame and an instant cure. Managers are fired and new managers are brought in to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. Those new managers remove a few ground floor employees to show their power. Employees are not only faced with the stress of constantly learning to work with new managers, and wondering how to avoid being the person fired to set the example, but they receive the message that no one is safe. As a result, they update their resumes and start searching for a place that is more secure. To build loyalty, you must be loyal in return. Don’t fire an employee until it’s very clear you’ve done everything in your power to resolve the problems, presuming the problems aren’t safety or legally based. Don’t layoff if there is another solution.

4. Promote from within, even in departments that don’t seem to have natural progression. Show your employees that even a gardener might find himself in a great job someday. Donald Trump is famous for promoting gardeners, chauffeurs, and other very ground floor employees into positions of power and authority. To do this, provide training, and consider allowing even secretaries and custodians to attend in-house training for higher positions. Offer tuition-reimbursement and monitor the classes taken to see who has earned a promotion. Loyalty is built when a person perceives that he may be able to upgrade his life with hard work.

5. Show employees they matter. Compliment them often. Do you know the names of your employees at every level? Address them by name and be prepared to compliment them regularly, which means you must pay attention to what they’re doing. Offer small but regular rewards for jobs well done. Respect their right to have a life outside the office. Your company may be the most important thing in the world to you, but your employees may care more about their personal lives--attending their child’s school play or taking their spouse out for a birthday celebration. Show respect for the personal life of your employees. Don’t demand overtime unless it’s essential. (Offering it, however, allows employees to handle special financial needs.) Caring builds loyalty.

Building employee loyalty is really a matter of recognizing how important your employees are to the well-being of your company. It’s also a matter of seeing every employee at every level as a real person, with needs, feelings and a life beyond the office, and respecting that person’s right to have his needs met within reason. A courteous, caring company will never have to create employee loyalty programs. It will just naturally build that type of environment. Remember how you felt when you weren’t the most important person in your company, and act accordingly.

Terrie Lynn Bittner is a founding partner in TML Business Services, providing consulting, training solutions, and business services to companies of all sizes