I wrote a Q & A column advising a guy who was conflicted about his work obligations versus his commitments at home.
This fellow’s job put him in situations where on a moment’s notice, he’d have to stay at work until ten p.m. or midnight and often miss important family events.
“What’s my obligation to my employer, exactly, and what is my employer’s obligation to me?” asked the reader in his query. In the column where I answered his question, I talked about setting boundaries and creating realistic expectations for handling business emergencies (some managers set a very low bar when describing a problem as “urgent”). I answered the question “What do I owe my boss, and what does he owe me?” this way:
“Your job is to do your best work every day. Your boss’s job is to give you a reason to come to work tomorrow.”
Given my email inbox the next day, you would have thought I’d written “Your job is to spray-paint nasty things about your manager all over the walls in your office and mix up the color-coded filing system such that no one can put it right again.”
The horrified messages flooded in. “You think a boss has an obligation to give people a reason to come to work tomorrow?” asked incredulous managers from around the world. “Whatever happened to employee loyalty?”
I scratch my head when someone asks me why employees don’t jump at their manager’s slightest whimsical demand and fall over themselves thanking their employers for their jobs.
We hire adults and expect them to exercise solid, adult judgment on the job. Maslow taught us that people need security before anything else apart from air and water – that reasonable people can’t devote themselves to any cause (yours, theirs or the Man in the Moon’s) without knowing that they’ll have a place to sleep and be able to feed their families tomorrow.
Why would we gush and coo over an employee whose misplaced priorities caused him to damage his mental and physical health, neglect his family and make his job his life, especially in an environment where the average tenure on a job is slipping below the average time it takes to earn a bachelor’s degree?
Who would find that kind of behavior praiseworthy?
I understand why employees are loyal to bosses and organizations that treat them like valued collaborators. I worked for a company like that for ten years, and I remember what it’s like to know that your company has your back. I know the opposite scenario, too, the one where the loud and clear message is “Your personal problems have nothing to do with us – you handle those on your own. Now, where’s that monthly report I asked for?”
My dad worked for the publishing company McGraw-Hill from 1950 to 1985. I don’t remember him talking even once about changing jobs. As a raw sales trainee, my dad knew that if he worked hard for the company, the company would do the right thing by him, and they did. My parents are in their eighties now, and still using the retiree health benefits my dad earned over those three and a half decades. How many of us can look forward to that kind of comfort in our later years?
Employee loyalty during the Mad Men era was a function of the loyalty that employers showed their staff members. My dad gave his best at work because his job security was a non-issue, something he could take for granted. He knew he was valued at work and that his job would be there until he was ready to retire. After thirty-five years in the firm, Dad took early retirement to open a bed-and-breakfast inn with my mom — a leap made possible in part by early-retirement benefits that few if any employers offer today.
Loyalty, of course, is a two-way street. Now that job security is a theoretical construct rather than a solid thing we can take out a loan or make major life decisions against, it’s ludicrous to expect employees to put work ahead of self or family. (I’m not sure it was ever healthy or wise to expect that, or even to want it; when did stressed-out and emotionally-spent people ever produce anything wonderful?)
The horrified and angry people who write to me asking “Whatever happened to employee loyalty?” are barking up the wrong tree. The relevant question is “Why would anyone expect employees to be loyal to employers who can (and do) change their work arrangements, cut their hours, cut their pay, and lay them off at a moment’s notice?”
The general decline in employer-employee relationships is only made worse by the brutally impersonal way these life-altering decisions are communicated – layoffs via email, for instance, or mass bureaucratic termination exercises like the one the Cleveland Plain-Dealer pulled on unfortunate staffers a few weeks ago.
Shame on the so-called leaders who treat their talented and dedicated people so shabbily. They can’t hide behind corporate shields; individual, weaselly leaders make these decisions, and karmic payback doesn’t care how many Drone-Speak memos a pondscum leader blasts out defending his indefensible actions. There is no corporate edifice to protect these leaders-in-name-only from the human ramifications of their cowardly decisions. They can pretend there is, but the rest of us, still human and unzombified, won’t fall for it.
Thanks to websites like Glassdoor.com(a kind of Yelp.com for employers) job-seekers can evaluate the cultures of the companies they’re considering before joining a new team. The better the tools become for vetting prospective employers before signing on, the faster the downward spiral of talent-unworthy employers will happen, and the more eyes-open, human-focused organizations will benefit.
Employee loyalty is going strong in Human Workplaces around the world, and where it exists, it’s been earned by thoughtful leaders who understand the connection between passion and performance. Loyalty hasn’t disappeared, but it isn’t automatic anymore the way it was in 1950, because the assumptions on which that old-fashioned loyalty rested, the ones my dad took for granted during his career, have eroded to the point of nonexistence.
Smart employers know that employees are loyal to bosses who tell the truth, ethical leaders who take responsibility for both wins and losses, and teammates who can bring their best to work every day knowing that a rug won’t be pulled suddenly out from under them.
Humans are incredibly trusting, as it turns out. We get emotionally and intellectually sucked into our jobs, and that attachment benefits our customers and shareholders every day. At Human Workplace, we teach people not to be less trusting but to require employers to deserve their trust — to ask questions about a company’s long-term plan, for instance, or to treat an imposition on family time as a negotiation opportunity (“Sure I can stay late tonight, but if I do that I have to leave early tomorrow”).
This isn’t impertinence or hubris. We only think it is because we’ve sucked down so much toxic Kool-Aid that we believe every minor request for personal time or space at work is a major step out of the box. The Godzilla structure of rules, fear and control has done a good job of weenifying huge chunks of the working population, and I know this because people write to me every day asking questions like “How should I approach my boss about getting a week off for my wedding, twelve months from now?”
It isn’t difficult to earn the loyalty of our team members. We only need to be loyal, back. That doesn’t mean we must guarantee their long-term employment. No one can do that. Maybe there are lifetime employment guarantees at the Vatican — that’s what I hear — but virtually nowhere else is a job today a guarantee of a job tomorrow. That’s okay; new-millennium working people don’t expect lifetime guarantees. They expect more fundamental things, like transparency and honesty.
They expect their leaders to be human, empathetic and trustworthy. They expect their personal lives to have weight and significance to the people they work for. They expect to be treated like human beings at work. That isn’t really a lot to ask, given that every time we hire a new employee, we’re well aware he or she is human. If we want machine performance, we know where to find it. If we want human ingenuity and brilliance, we’ve got to acknowledge and celebrate human talent, human quirkiness, human power and human entanglements. They come with the territory, we might say.
via What Happened to Employee Loyalty? | LinkedIn.
What Happened to Employee Loyalty?
