Employee Loyalty In Today’s Challenging Business Environment

Most companies demand loyalty from their employees and maintain a disciplinary regime for non-compliance. This had worked well in the past as most people knew that if you were to commit any wrongdoing, deliberate or otherwise, there would be some form of punishment, and this applied to serious work-mistakes made as well.

However, it’s becoming painfully obvious that loyalty is fast-becoming a one-sided value in most organisations, especially the bigger ones. In today’s challenging business environment, we are regularly reading about companies downsizing and retrenching employees just because their profits have fallen. These companies are still profitable but in order to improve their bottom-line, they embark on cost-cutting measures, which inadvertently involve headcount reduction.

Depending on their age and academic qualifications, some of these retrenched employees would find it almost impossible to find alternative employment that would give them a decent income; and to add insult to injury, the retrenching companies would also take advantage of the economic situation to reduce redundancy payments to their employees who were not protected by employee-unions.

In understanding the scenario mentioned above, how then could such companies even think that they deserve loyalty from their existing employees who were not affected by the downsizing exercise?

If retrenchments are indeed necessary, companies should show some care and concern for their affected employees by giving them decent redundancy payments. This would go a long way for existing and future employees to see these companies as caring employers.