To understand employee loyalty, let’s start with the business’s faithfulness to customers. It will make you objective and open to understanding the definition.
You will also realize that in business, loyalty is different. For instance, Josiah Royce’s definition of loyalty may not work well for employees and the workplace.
Josiah Royce’s definition of loyalty
Loyalty is the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.
– The philosophy of loyalty
Now, let’s see what loyalty means in business.
Loyalty in business
A business is loyal to consumers if they take care of the preferences and interests of consumers. To achieve this, brands do their best to provide high-quality products or services to solve customers’ issues.
Makes sense?
It means if a business is trying to understand the customer and doing its best to satisfy them, that’s business loyalty. The demands can be seasonal, temporary, or harder to attain, but businesses always do their best to retain their customers.
Right?
Now let’s understand employee loyalty definition.
An employee is loyal if he gives his best to understand business goals and values and works hard to achieve those goals.
The journey starts with working on SMART goals, let’s say, the targets for employees.
Let’s dig deep to understand it. We will also see how employee loyalty is unique for all employees and what you can do to get their best.
As we now understand, the first characteristic of a loyal employee is that he tries to understand the goals and values of a business.
So it depends on the values and goals your employees have perceived.
If an HR manager believes that the goals of a business are financial growth, he will prioritize finances in all internal matters too.
He will compromise on other employees’ benefits to get your business more money. (A true story of my friend backs this statement).
So it’s significant to know if your employees understand the true essence of your values and goals.
After that, you can judge if an employee puts all the energy into achieving the best results for the assigned duties. You can consider the employee a loyal employee.
Here is what I mean by all energy.
If you give a task to an employee, and he doesn’t utilize his creativity to attain the target, say he wants you to make things easy for him, and then he will work on it, that’s disloyalty.
A couple of days ago, I assigned work to my employees. It was consumer based. It was an easy task but required some extra effort to complete. They needed to use their external resources to get assistance to complete the work.
Some employees didn’t bother to use their external resources to complete the task.
I understand that loyalty doesn’t happen on its own. You need to take care of tools to make employees loyal.
As my position was changed a few days ago, and this team didn’t have a practical leader earlier, it will take a lot of effort to run this team and deliver the organization’s values in true meaning.
If you want to make your employees, you should work on the tools that make employees loyal.
There is another thing that you should keep in mind to understand employee loyalty.
Retention has nothing to do with employee loyalty.
Everyone wants to grow and might have some bigger dreams or plans. It’s even better to help them reach their destinations. It makes them loyal, and they work with devotion.
Say you have a startup or a small business; your employees would never dream of living with you for life. They must be thinking about becoming a part of a well-reputed company in the future. It can be due to humans’ basic needs: security, money, or growth.
That doesn’t mean you are doing wrong or your employees are disloyal.
Instead, you should focus on if your employees are giving their best for the monthly, quarterly, or annual targets and tasks. If they are doing their best, that’s loyalty.
Well, it doesn’t mean you should not strive to retain employees. We have research-based basic needs that can help you attract and retain loyal employees.