Do You Practise 'Safe' Loyalty?
BNET blogger Jo Owen once identified disloyalty as one of four sins the boss wouldn't forgive. But maybe we should ask the question the other way around: what are the four sins an employee won't forgive?
Because, as Richard Leyland proves, it's the employer's commitment to employees that determines how long loyalty lives. And it looks as if the UK record for sustaining loyalty is a bit patchy.
The recession's partly to blame, making the UK an 'employers' market'-- a recent INGRADA survey found the average number of applicants per job in Britain is 49, even though, at £25,000, a British starting salary comes in comparatively low.
But the same survey found UK company retention rates after five years to be the worst of five nations, suggesting the problem is more ingrained. (Hong Kong and the US keep graduate hires the longest.)
"It may be that graduate retention among 2004 joiners just wasn't that high a priority," suggest Gary Argent, business operations manager at the Association of Graduate Recruiters. Pre-recession, in a buoyant job market, companies that lost a good grad simply shelled out the cash to find a replacement.
Post-recession, it's likely that the 'talent war' will heat up again. HR professionals are already predicting higher attrition rates this year than in 2009, according to Stockholm-based employer branding company Universum.
Companies that showed little loyalty to their employees during the downturn may face a goodwill deficit within the business, let alone among potential hires. In the good times, recruiters may've created a 'promise gap' between how they 'sold' a company to new hires and what those grads actually experienced once on board. Strangely, this matters more now that jobs are scarcer -- unless you're willing to risk eroding wider loyalty by reneging on your promises. If an employer fails to reciprocate loyalty, according to David Pardey of the Institute of Leadership and Management, it's "a slap in the face" that can resound around the business if resentment spreads. If they don't already, recruiters and line managers should get together to agree on what they can promise new hires.
Talent recruitment has been the focus so far, but development will sustain loyalty.
Up to a point. Believe it or not, you can generate too much loyalty -- 'brandwashing' employees so that they lose their own sense of self and take on the corporation's values wholesale. (Andersen Consulting's employees, for example, were nicknamed "Androids".)
Recruits to "build-from-within" cultures are particularly vulnerable, says Stuart Woollard, director of the HRM Learning Board at King's College, London, who says: "You need a healthy sense of separation from your employer, or a layoff can feel like personal rejection."
In other words, practise what Pardey at the ILM calls 'safe' loyalty -- "emotionally-driven but justified rationally". Sensible -- but is it as easy as it sounds?