Transcript: When loyal workers are bad for business

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘When loyal workers are bad for business’

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick.

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Finding and recruiting staff is fiendishly expensive, so it’s no surprise managers want their best staff to stick around. But keeping good people might be getting harder. A huge number of the global workforce are disengaged from their jobs, and workers, especially younger staff, want more from their careers than previous generations. How can managers keep hold of their best staff? Should employees looking for a pay rise jump ship? And is too much loyalty a bad thing? The FT’s management editor, Anjli Raval, wrote a brilliant column on the perils of professional loyalty. I’ll be talking to her later to find out why too much loyalty can hurt employees and businesses.

But first, I’m going to speak to Jeremie Brecheisen. He’s managing director of the Emea region for Gallup, a workplace consulting and research group. Gallup publishes a huge annual study called the State of the Global Workplace report, which asks employees about their wellbeing, how they feel about work, and whether they’re looking to change jobs. The last edition of the survey showed that more than half of employees were looking to make a change. Why is that?

Jeremie Brecheisen
We’ve had prolonged disengagement. Now we’ve found that prolonged disengagement has a bigger impact on you and your whole life than almost anything else. In fact, when we ask people how they feel about their jobs, if they say they hate their jobs, they invariably tell us they hate their lives. And so when your job is impacting your life that much, you start looking for a new solution because it’s impacting your relationships. It’s impacting your ability to enjoy time with family and friends or to have family and friends.

Isabel Berwick
Could you describe what engagement is exactly? It’s quite a nebulous term.

Jeremie Brecheisen
Yeah. It’s about psychological and emotional commitment. It’s not about a rational commitment. And when you have that, you’re engaged. If you have the opposite of that, you’re what we call actively disengaged. Or sometimes I call them cave dwellers, C-A-V-E — consistently against virtually everything.

Isabel Berwick
(Laughter) That’s brilliant. So I imagine there’s quite a strong link or lack of link between engagement and loyalty if there’s an emotional component.

Jeremie Brecheisen
Yeah, they’re definitely connected, but you can be loyal without being engaged. But when you’re engaged, you’re loyal all the time, and you’re the right kind of loyalty.

Isabel Berwick
I mean, are employees feeling particularly disengaged at the moment?

Jeremie Brecheisen
Yeah. I described two of the categories: engaged and actively disengaged. The area in the middle is where most people sit. We call it not engaged. I would call it indifference. Things are just not a big deal. Like if I asked you, hey, why isn’t your manager recognising you more? If you’re in that middle category, which most people are, they would say, well, you know, he’s busy. What are you gonna do? And so what that means is they don’t give discretionary effort. Their ideas are a bit halfhearted. And that’s where most of them are. It’s just this indifference.

Isabel Berwick
And when we talk about loyalty to an employer, if someone is indifferent, would they actually have the energy to look elsewhere or change jobs?

Jeremie Brecheisen
Sometimes it does lead to indifference of looking for a new job, and that’s kind of the problem, right? You think it’s terrible when you hear, oh, over half of people are looking for a new job, but what if they’re being indifferent and they’re not looking for a good job and they’re just gonna stay with you? And they’re gonna talk to your customers with that indifference? That’s something to worry about as well.

Isabel Berwick
So we could say that loyalty can sometimes be misplaced, because loyalty might be a sort of indifferent or almost negative trait, because it’s a lack of energy to do something else. So when people do decide to move jobs, for example, what’s the main reason for that, apart from they don’t like the job they’re in? Is it more, you know, poor wage growth?

Jeremie Brecheisen
When we do surveys and we try to find out why would someone wanna leave their job, there’s four reasons. One is pay. I wanna make more money. Another one is wellbeing, work-life balance. Three is I don’t have the opportunity to do what I do best here. And four, I’m looking for job stability in a world of mass change always happening all the time. There are so many things changing now. Can you be the company that helps them know what’s not changing? Can you be the company that helps them realise what their future can be and do they have a future here? And how strong is that future for us together?

Isabel Berwick
If you could say one thing to managers who are listening to this about how they can and should encourage loyalty among their staff, you know, what would it be? What have you learned?

Jeremie Brecheisen
The worst thing you can do to a human being is ignore them. And if you’re not talking to your people, there’s no way you’re developing them. Management is all about your people. It’s not about managing performance. It’s about managing people who perform. And that means you have to start talking to them more often. And that sounds simple, but very few people say their manager even speaks to them on a weekly basis. Start there. It’s easy. It’s low-hanging fruit. And that will change a lot of the problems that you’re facing with this person.

Isabel Berwick
Thank you, Jeremie.

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Jeremie Brecheisen
Thank you for having me.

Isabel Berwick
The relationship between engagement and loyalty is worth thinking about. Employees who are doing exciting work and being properly compensated are much more likely to stick around. But as Jeremie hinted, loyalty is a little bit double-edged. Too much of it can hurt a company, and it can certainly hurt employees. I wanted to know more about the downsides of loyalty, so I sat down with the FT’s management editor, Anjli Raval, who wrote a brilliant article on that topic. Anjli, welcome to Working It.

Anjli Raval
Hi.

Isabel Berwick
So we tend to think of loyalty as a virtue in the workplace. But have we been wrong all along?

Anjli Raval
When we think about loyalty, it’s at least historically in our own lives and our relationships with family, friends, romantic partners, it is seen as a good thing, you know? It’s about being moral and upstanding. However, in the workplace, on the one hand, being loyal means that you probably go above and beyond for your workplace. It means you probably do get the odd pay rise, but there are limits. Quite frankly, you may be asked to do way more than the average employee, and you may be taken advantage of.

Isabel Berwick
There’s a perception that being loyal to an employer isn’t the best way to earn more money. Is that your sense, too?

Anjli Raval
Most people I speak to among my peers, let alone in this job when I’m interviewing people, it’s very clear. You know, if you want a pay rise, you almost have to threaten to leave — and you have to be serious about it. And that’s been the case for decades, right? That hasn’t really changed.

But people are thinking about loyalty differently, largely because the perks are not there in the way that they used to be. Pensions packages don’t exist in the same way. The company card doesn’t exist in the same way. And younger people see this. They’re not able to buy a house in the way their parents may have been able to. Their salaries are not able to get them as far. And so this idea of doing the hard slog to get somewhere hypothetically in 15 years’ time, that kind of thinking has shifted.

Isabel Berwick
And I think there is a flipside to loyalty. You know, I hear a lot of stories about older employees who are sort of time-serving, I’m thinking particularly in public sector organisations because they are thinking about their excellent pensions. But actually, for a lot of younger workers, that’s not there for them, is it?

Anjli Raval
No. And, you know, just like in other aspects of their lives, younger people want to do work that is not only meaningful, helpful, useful; they want to be doing something interesting and exciting. The idea of just working for working’s sake doesn’t exist in the same way.

Isabel Berwick
The employee experience idea is really a growing one, and actually that encourages loyalty, I think. But you wrote a piece recently where I think I’m right in suggesting that you say the only people who really benefit from employee loyalty are companies and bosses.

Anjli Raval
People who are loyal and are engaged, they do benefit. You know, they do get promotions and they do get pay rises. And there is a far greater sense of belonging. However, if you’re thinking about the research that looks into this, it all points to this idea of, you know, managers essentially being more likely to exploit loyal individuals and the reason to sort of foster loyalty among your workers. It really is to help offset a shortage of skilled workers, you know, reduce the churn, cut recruitment costs. So you can see why there is this obsession with company and employee engagement and all these companies trying to track, you know, how emotionally and psychologically invested a person is in their work.

Isabel Berwick
But in your article, you mentioned that employees can be too engaged with work. They can be too loyal. How does that manifest itself?

Anjli Raval
I think if you’ve spent a very long time at an organisation and, you know, you do have a sense of belonging, you may be more forgiving of individuals when things are not going right. And in some cases, you’re probably less likely to call out, you know, really terrible things happening. There’s some research on the case of whistleblowers and how you’re more likely to overlook wrongdoing and expose corruption in certain cases. So sometimes loyalty is used to justify bad behaviour too.

Isabel Berwick
And I think there is this idea, you know, sometimes the most loyal people are the people you don’t want to be most loyal. You might get a sort of stagnation of ideas, you know. New people bring in exciting new ways of working. Are there ways in which managers can encourage people to be, if we can say, less loyal? Do you know what I mean? I mean, they might be great employees, but perhaps they should move on.

Anjli Raval
This is why I think this idea of entrepreneurs — you know, people who essentially either create new lines of business or do other projects outside of their sort of daily working life — is a very healthy and good thing. It creates new ideas, it maybe challenges a certain way of thinking. It’s a really good way to think about removing stagnation in the workplace, I think, anyway.

Isabel Berwick
And going back to the other end of the spectrum, are company leaders prioritising this problem of how to engage younger workers?

Anjli Raval
It’s so important, and it’s something that a lot of senior business people are thinking about, like how do you get the next generation of workers to essentially be dutiful? You know, younger people are just seen as less trustful. They are not as patient when it comes to career progression and salary raises. They see little benefit in just keeping their head down and cracking on and really following orders. And I don’t think this is the case everywhere, but particularly in industries where there is a talent crunch and where workers do have more leverage, you are seeing this play out.

Isabel Berwick
And are there times in our career, do you think, when it pays to be more or less loyal, you know, is it better to job hop less when you’re older, for example? I mean, I think that probably is the case for most people.

Anjli Raval
What I would say is, there are times in your life where actually the goodwill that you have built up over years does pay off. Your managers are more likely to help you work around you, I would hope. And in those times, actually, it does make sense that you then use that and leverage that. But if you have opted in for a life of endless moving around, job hopping, you know, chasing the next pay rise or the next exciting opportunity, it’s almost built into your way of thinking that that safety net isn’t there.

Isabel Berwick
Anjli, thank you so much for coming in.

Anjli Raval
Thanks for having me on.

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Isabel Berwick
When people think about leaving a job, they take into account a bunch of factors: salary, purpose, opportunities to develop work relationships and how those factors relate to their personal situations. Some of those things are outside a manager’s control. You won’t always have a say in an employee’s pay or what kind of work they’re doing. But you can listen to what your team needs and do what’s in your power to give it to them.

I think what Anjli said there about internal job moves was interesting. You don’t want your best people to move to other companies, but you don’t want to foster a stagnant environment, ignoring new methods and new ideas. In the end, loyalty goes both ways. Loyal workers should have their faith repaid and decent bosses should convince workers to stick around. But too much loyalty on either side can harm, not help.

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Thanks to Jeremie Brecheisen and Anjli Raval. This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.