The larger the company, and the more they're ballooned out with abstract drones chomping on abstract work items, the more loyalty becomes a means for abuse. Turnover is rampant and their processes are built to optimally accommodate it. They're egregores, not people, and they don't experience loyalty or attachment. But they do benefit from yours, and so they'll milk it until you give up
But in smaller groups and smaller communities, where you're actually working with people, loyalty and even affection can really make a difference in how satisfying your worklife is, how much security you can feel in your opportunities, etc
It's not so much that there's "no place for loyalty in employer-employee relationships", it's just that the place for loyalty is different depending on what's inhabiting the employer role opposite you -- and the high-profile large employers of the modern age are incapable of reciprocating. But if loyalty comes naturally to you, and feels good to you when reciprocated, you have the option to look elsewhere instead of seething in resentment and disappointment.
I was the first US employee of an Indian consulting startup. I was their engagement lead for a marquee account for the first 4 years and while I do not take all the credit, my management and I grew the account from 1 person to 250 by the time I left. What did I get in return? A 10% reduction in salary from my previous job, almost no pay hikes (there were some) for 4 years, a whole lot of "we are family" talk, and zero stock. Of course I was naive and did not have things in writing, but I still believe they owe me 3% of an 80 M exit price because that's what they verbally told me. But no, good employers turned into bad employers very quickly.
Of course there is a lot more to the story, I had my own faults, but I am not naming anyone and I am not publishing my story here. That life is over, I am not fighting that battle, this was 15-20 years back and I finally did move on and do other stuff.
But that 3% after a decade or more of (well managed) growth would have been awesome.
Apparently 80% are already gone:
https://escapecollective.com/how-komoot-lost-its-way/
(paywalled, but I think it's the definitive aftermath writeup, as opposed to all the older news that stop at speculating about layoffs that had not happened yet)
In a large company, it happens regardless of the qualities of the people involve, because it's baked into the processes. Good-natured people can mitigate it to some extent, but they cannot prevent it.
Differentiating between the two based on signals during hiring is almost impossible, though.
A company as a group of close friends? Be my guest. A company that pretends that we have bonds of blood, or are married? Not for me (unless we're actually family, as in family business).
People get me a job when I look for one.
(Another thing I keep repeating is "You are not your job".)
I've been in IT for over 20 years, mostly working in small to mid-sized companies. Small companies will let you go as soon as they feel a pinch. every company is the same, no matter their size.
You're expected to give two weeks' notice, but they can let you go without any notice.
Corporate loyalty is the dumbest trick employers ever pulled.
Luckily, this is not the case where I live. Both sides have the same amount of notice
That said, the real safety is in accumulated money you can live on when all goes south. I'd personally take bigger salary over longer notice any day of the week.
Having seen companies of all sizes lay people off for the exact same reason - Returns did not match expectations - my personal perspective is to treat all employers the same.
No company with a balance sheet is loyal to employees. Keeping that idea in mind, and thus on an equal perspective, is healthy for both sides. "It's just business" is good advice and not just in movies.
Had an interview. I'm a professional good at my craft, with tenure at hard positions.
I get hit with "we don't just want someone who checks in does work and leaves, 9 to 5". Like, are you wanting 60h/week and pay 40h/week? Or is this you're not wanting a slacker?
Or better yet, since you want skin in the game on my side, what's my equity as a partner?
My understanding is that I shop up and work well, and you pay me. And I'm in an at-will employment state, so it really is 1 day at a time.
Loyalty is bought at 1 day increments, since that is all the loyalty is afforded to me.
However, I will definitely lie, since no recruiter or HR wants to admit that their candidate is here because you pay. Its the verboten secret everyone dances around.
I do. I want people to work a normal day. The alternative is they run into a wall of fatigue at the worst times, and call out sick.
I can plan a project around five 8 hour days a week. I can't plan around 60+ hours one week, and (unknown) hours some future week.
So they are hoping to hire someone who will do it for free
They made a point at 'work-life balance', decent but not great PTO. Pay was from 150-300, but glassdoor shows around 175.
It did have on call, but my profession does.
But the conversation was weird - what were they REALLY asking for that they couldn't outright say? Were they trying to ask if I have a family and obligations? Pregnant wife? Willingness to slave away hours above my negotiated pay?
It definitely felt strange. This is a job, not a calling. And they would 'transact' (read: fire) me just as fast if the economics didn't pan out.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. When an employer implements an "aloof" layer between the work done and the bottom line, the employer and employee don't get to bond. You and your company should be on the same page when it comes to generating business and on the same page when it comes to concerns. Shipmates, for real. With layers of management of all varieties (middle management, project management, developer management (this is tricky because the Dev Lead becomes your only connection to the bottom line)), the "aloofness" leads to unfulfilled lives. That's when the employee doesn't feel fulfilled or understands who they are on the ship. And it follows that the captain(s) of the ship (leadership) are unfulfilled because they are no longer in love with the crew (can easily fire, hire, layoff, disconnect from the employees lives). I haven't fully thought this thought out so I will probably expand on it as time goes on, but this is my line of thinking at the moment.
It's a love issue due to a lack of direct bonding (and no, company social gatherings and "fun" is not the bonding I am talking about. I am talking about taking on Moby Dick together). The love is indirectly routed through these other layers until it's been fully diluted and misunderstood, unfulfilling to all. Everyone must love the ship, the crew, the captain, the ocean, and the whale they are hunting.
Every strength is also a weakness. Small groups like that can also very effective because their trust runs deeper than work. The real lie is that thousands of unrelated strangers trying to get paid will have each other’s interests at heart.
As organizations grow, they become more than a mere sum of its parts. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon driven by complexity - as humans interact, this very interaction creates something resembling an entity in its own right past a certain scale, with its own agenda (distinct from individual agendas of its constituent humans) and drive for self-preservation as a whole - the egregore that you mentioned. My pet theory is that this starts to happen when you scale beyond the Dunbar number, but the effect is only obvious at scales where most members of the organization are faceless strangers to each other.
Either way, this emergent entity is decidedly amoral.
In a smaller shop, there's less flex overall for departures and more incentive to abuse the personal relationships built.
You are right that loyalty changes depending on org chart, but it's how senior you are. Senior execs have more vested in the company, both in their career and stock options.
But loyalty to a company is complete, utter BS.
This is different from personal loyalty.
It's a little like politeness. Social grace. Don't demean yourself of course, but treating entities which treat you well reciprocally is valid and even moral.
If the CEO, who is 6 levels removed from me makes a decision to cut an entire department, it is hard to see how "company" loyalty makes sense. As far as I'm concerned, the CEO is an external force.
Social grace, treating people well who treat you well - I agree with all that. But that is not loyalty. It is simply transactional reciprocality. If you are calling that "working loyalty", fine, we are on the same page.
To feel human you have to take these emotional risks. You shouldn’t bet your life that a mega-corp has absolute and utter loyalty to you. You shouldn’t bet your entire life that your spouse has absolute loyalty to you (we have divorce, pre-nups, and post-nups for a reason). But it strikes me as a pretty soulless existence to have no loyalty to your place of work, in the same way it would be a pretty soulless existence to never form loyalty with the people in your life, even if it isn’t absolute loyalty.
People - people can absolutely deserve loyalty, and those people can be managers, coworkers, spouses, family, etc.
But don't mix the two up in your mind.
A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism". A sports-team or TV show or band is a thing, loyalty to it is called "fandom". Loyalty to an idea or philosophy is called "being principled" or "idealism". Do you believe that things don't deserve loyalty, such that all of these are errors? Or do these examples not capture the sense of your statement?
Of course this naive view quickly falls apart when interpretation comes into play, as it always must. In the extreme, one may assert that "philosophy" is encoded in the behavior of it's adherents, and these behaviors may have little or nothing to do with the "canonical" representation of the philosophy as immutable text. Or more precisely the behavior and words can be profoundly decoupled. Many examples of this decoupling occurs to your thought (and mine). So when you say that a philosophy can "turn away" from values, in this sense that is true.
I prefer to think of philosophies as a kind of Platonic ideal, which are then subject to all the foibles of the humans who associate themselves to them. There are some subtle problems with this view, which I'd rather not confront.
So the idea as it was might be a value, but what the word means may decay into something frankenstein wouldn't recognise as his handy work .
Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.
A less cynical take: there seems to be some research that following sports fosters greater social connectivity and well-being. It may just be that we're hardwired to be tribal. From that context, sports seems to be a relatively benign way to tap into that.
However, you should acquaint yourself with the principle of subsidiarity. Loyalty, duty, and love radiate outward from those who are owed the most diminishing to those who are owed the least (spouses, then children, then parents, etc., all the way through extended family and then community and nation and finally the human race). The loyalty is to the objective good. How that is expressed will be modified by contingent factors particular to a given person's situation.
--EM Forster, "What I Believe"
I am not betraying my country by refusing to follow laws or decrees that require that I engage in intrinsically evil deeds. I am not loyal to my friend if I do evil things he asks me to do.
Our loyalty is to the objective good of our country and our friend. Otherwise, there is no such thing as loyalty.
That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself. People often see their “external tribes” as an extension of their self much likely they do family/friends, rather than them being part of it like a company. I am a Spillett. I am a Yorkshireman, I am English, I am UKian, I am European, I work for TL. Notice the difference in language in that last one.
This is part of why some get so offended when you poke fun at their town/county/country: if they see it as an extension of their identity more than just somewhere they live then your disrespect is a personal attack. They would not likely defend their employer nearly as passionately.
I would argue that this is a tit-for-tat, and as such, not really an example of loyalty per se. Loyalty would be protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you and yours in any tangible way. And it has all the same problems as corporate loyalty, really.
Perhaps this needs some nuance. It seems like duty has some relevance here. Military service may not actually benefit someone directly, and it could easily be a detriment at the individual level. But societies struggle to operate effectively for very long when everyone takes an individualistic transactional mindset. At some point, it becomes a collective action problem that needs to find a balance between serving a sense of duty to society as a whole and society not taking advantage of such sentiments.
Where I come from in Europe - they say we have proud history going back some 1500 years. Well before that, there were other tribes, we are same type of immigrants as current waves. We either mingled with them, killed them or drove them away. I am pretty sure genetic tracing would favor the mingling for the most part.
What makes more sense is really what all others say - pick up a specific set of people, philosophy, moral imperative etc. and be loyal to them. Higher concepts muddy the waters with slippery slopes and are unnecessary, just opening surfaces to manipulation.
I guess you could argue the same for a church.
On the other side, certainly a fluid labor market such as tech was a couple of years ago would foster a lack of loyalty, as employees hop from employer to employer for rapid career growth.
None of this necessarily contradicts with your point. It's just labor relations don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes a lot needs to be done to earn trust in a low-trust cultural environment.
I think another shift around Welch was that companies used to focus more on long term value, which would result in stock price increases in the long term, even if not in any given short term. That if a company was healthy and valuable, one of the many benefits would be rising stocks. The shift to focus on short term stock increases as almost the only goal, means companies will pull the copper piping out the walls and destroy the house if it means a juicy bump in the Q3 earnings call.
It's 100% an emergence scam behavior of corporate entities to trick their employees into developing loyalty and tricking managers / founders etc into thinking its not just a way of scamming lower-end employees imo... I never got the feeling that managers were consciously trying to trick us into developing loyalty, felt more like they were then ones drinking the most coolaid on it...
Also agree with the base human need to feel at least some loyalty in any relationship to feel like it's healthy.
I think my hack has been to develop loyalty to people on my team laterally. Seems to work but sometimes leadership / management still seems like they catch a whiff that I dont have a deep emotional need to respond to their frantic 8pm or Sunday afternoon Teams messages...
But if they fire me for not being loyal who cares, the economies doing great right?
I think it's good to have admiration for the company (or any organization) you work for. If you can't find anything you admire, it might be better to find another place to work where you can.
This implies having the privilege of having options. For me, it's probably the primary reason I try to direct my career toward having skills or connections that give me options.
But your mega corp doesn't have loyalty to you. They have loyalty to their shareholders, and you are a means to that end. The shareholders are the spouse, and you are just the person they paid to make the yearly birthday present. If a little flattery gets them a better price, then they flatter. If their spouse's interests change, you'll never see them again.
Equally, if you presenting yourself well and negotiating well gets you a better wage to make that birthday present, then you should do those things. It's a two-way street.
> loyalty for a company is concept to make you work harder without asking anything in return. And the moment the company shifts focus and you are out of it, then suddenly you understand that this loyalty wasn't kind of a credits account which you've been saving all this time. It's simply nothing.
This is what you were responding to, which is not transactional. You are loyal to your spouse (to a point) because you trust her to have your best interests in mind and be aligned in the common goal of improving life for you both. A corporation’s spouse is the shareholder and has their best interests in mind, not the employee.
Loyalty is a commitment to the objective good of the other, of skin in the game. Loyalty is hierarchical and the particular variety and its entailed commitments depends on the particular nature of the relationship.
In a hyperindividualist liberal society, the presumption is basically Hobbesian; life is taken to be intrinsically and thoroughly adversarial and exploitative, and relationships are taken to be basically instrumental and transactional. (This even informs scientific interpretation, as science is downstream of culture.) Society is taken to be intrinsically a matter of "contract" or a kind of Mexican standoff. Loyalty is a quaint and anachronistic notion, a passing emotion that expires the moment the landscape of opportunities shifts. Provisional and temporary.
There's no point in asking first, whether employers should be loyal to their employers or vice versa. The important question is whether they are good to one another. If they are, you might also find loyalty among them, but that's not where the focus should be.
Someone who gets obsessed with loyalty too much, I think, is likely to have sinister intentions. They probably want you to be loyal to them but don't plan on being good to you.
If we narrow the scope to employment, there is a variety of loyalty to the common good of the company at work, in due proportion and priority, when you join the company. Each employee is bound in this manner, including the guy deciding your salary or your termination. Otherwise, what are you doing there?
Now, loyalty isn't stupidity. Perhaps this is what people associate with the word when they hear it. They perhaps imagine some poor, gullible, childish pushover. It should be obvious that this is stupid. No, loyalty to a company is a commitment to the common good of the company within the scope of your responsibilities. That's it.
Now, given the nature of at-will employment, that commitment is contingent on actual employment. When you leave the company, your commitment ends. But while you work at that company, you must be committed to the common good of that company. Again, why else are you there? The nature of employment makes this a kind of elective loyalty of utility.
The fact that employers might try to manipulate employees emotionally by misusing and abusing words like "loyalty" in order to exploit them is a different matter. In that case, the employer is being disloyal to the company and its employees. How you should respond to that kind of disloyalty is contingent on the particulars of that disloyalty and the particulars of your personal circumstances.
We have got to get away from this relativist, subjectivist battle of wills. What matters is the objective good.
> Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.
I'm not sure what to make of this. The scope is also too broad to say anything useful here. In friendship, loyalty is a prerequisite for it being a good relationship. Loyalty to a friend is commitment to their objective good. A disloyal friend harms the friendship. How can there be friendship without loyalty?
I suppose a good question to ask is: what does it mean to be disloyal? It is every okay to be disloyal? Disloyalty presumes loyalty is normative and owed. But loyalty is not always normative, because it would be a category mistake. If I work for Boeing, I am not being disloyal toward Airbus, because I have no commitments toward Airbus. But I would be disloyal to Boeing if I were to illicitly funnel work done at Boeing to Airbus, harming Boeing. In the context of friendship, loyalty may grow with the friendship, but being more loyal to friend A than to friend B doesn't mean I am disloyal to B. A smaller glass full of water simply holds less water, but it is no less full than a larger glass full of water. It is simply that there is an order and priority of loyalty in due proportion with the nature of the friendship. I owe more loyalty to my family than I do to my community, but it's not an either/or proposition. It simply means that my commitment to and prioritization of the good of my family is higher (this relates to the ordo amoris that made a splash in the news recently).
Employer employee relationships are completely financial. Almost legally required to be that way on the employer’s side.
With hypercapitalist corporations loyalty is a one-way street. The employee is expected to be loyal, while corporations drop them casually if it benefits them. Loyalty is realized when one of the sides endure some downsides in thr expectations that these will be resolved in the long term. So if you dump someone the minute that downside appears, you aren't and never have been loyal.
The mutuality is important. You absolutely shouldn't think of yourself as "loyal" to a company that won't stick up for you. (And many companies won't, to be clear. If asked to choose between cutting executive salaries by 2% and firing you, most companies won't think too hard about that. You shouldn't be loyal to those ones.)
The company treats me well and preserves my job while I'm planning not to leave. Until they don't. Because once the transaction is more trouble than its worth - either financially, or politically, or interpersonally - I'm gone. But if I am planning to leave, the company doesn't know that and treats me the exact same way.
Like fuck they do. They make a cost-benefit guess about proactive moves to reduce attrition, and the amount they do is tied the cost of replacement for the role in question.
Plenty of examples of people (me included) that when their superior changes projects or leaves the company etc, they know and trust you and they want to move you with them.
I for example managed to switch from a dull team that drove me to almost the verge of quitting to a very exciting skunkworks team that I had a blast working in for almost 2 years, let alone doubling my compensation.
That happened because I was loyal to my SEM, in the sense of giving extra time if he was on the line, giving honest feedback and generally trying to make them “succeed”, the moment a risky and important project was on the table at the org he was like - “let’s organize a crack team” and invited me on board … and it was such a cool experience.
“The company” itself doesn’t “feel” anything towards the people working for it, it’s the people behind it that are influenced by such things.
The best orgs would have those personal loyalties also align with the orgs mission, but they are still personal - given from humans to humans.
Of course there is a fine line in “being a good resource” and “sucking up”, but good managers usually know the difference.
My ex- was working towards becoming a veterinarian. During a gap in schooling, she looked at some jobs as a tech or assistant.
She found a good fit, and got to the point of having an offer. But she was having a crisis of conscience. The ad, and interviewers, had talked about how they wanted people who would be invested and committed in the practice. Not in and out in a few months. But she knew that in 9-10 months she would be doing more schooling. Could she take the job in good conscience, knowing that?
Absolutely she could. I said this to her:
Okay, so they're asking for someone who'll be there for years, is committed to them.
Say you start work, and in three months there's a recession, or just a downturn in their business. Is their response more likely to be:
1) "Business is hard, times are tough, but you are committed to us and we are committed to you, so no layoffs, no firings, no pay decreases. Let's get through this together."
or will it be
2) "Business is hard, times are tough, so today will be your last day at XYZ Vet Hospital, thank you for your service."
It was shocking at the time. To young me, it was a big "....oh" kind of realization about what kind of relationship you can/should have with any kind of business.
Now, I'm here cause you pay me. I don't keep stuff at my desk or decorate 'my' space. I show up, do the job, and leave. Once I close this laptop, work is dead to me until the next day.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't occasionally work more than 40hr/week, but most of the time my work/life balance is fantastic by choice.
It’s taken me a long time to learn, but that form of loyalty doesn’t equate to employer loyalty.
Ok, but it's not loyalty. At least I hope not...
Those like-minded peers you've had owed you no nothing. You had a fair, respectful, professional relationship with them that was self sustaining and therefore did not demand allegience in either direction.
If a better opportunity came along for them I would hope that you would want them to take it despite your history and the camaraderie you've established with them. And same for you.
To me, it was not about people leaving you behind, but calling you up when opportunities arise (though I didn't feel that way when it first happened at the beginning of my career). Camaraderie doesn't mean you owe people or are owed anything, but is a mutual level of trust and support.
Of the 6 jobs I've had over the past 20 years, 5 of them have been from former colleagues reaching out.
I've been accused of being disloyal simply for being honest and not agreeing with someone else's stance. So in my gut, loyalty implies abondoning your principals or compromising yourself in some way in order to gain or keep favor with someone else.
I suppose others may think of loyalty as a positive trait. But in the context of of a profressional relationship, I can't see any reason we should want loyalty to play a role.
That may be true for a bad employer but no good employer should ever demand loyalty in exchange for continued employment.
If you hire a landscaping service to mow your lawn every week do you demand loyalty from them? I hope not, because that would be ridiculous.
While I was talking to my partner (at the time) about her taking a part-time job while waiting on school, I worked for an employer that absolutely earned my loyalty:
She had enrolled in school for her pre-vet med course. But due to a mix up with financial aid or loans or similar, she woke up one morning to find that at about 6am the university had sent her an email saying that they'd not received tuition from her, and that they would soon be dropping her from her course. By the time she'd woke up they'd already done so. She panicked. I knew we'd done most of the work so I told her to jump in the shower and we'd go to the college and try to get it taken care of.
I told my boss (co-founder and CTO, though not so much a startup - small, but established a decade or more and profitable) I'd be out of touch for a few hours trying to deal with an issue. He and I talked a lot, and he could tell something was up so he asked what was up and I explained. His response earned a lot of loyalty from me (though we managed to get it taken care of without this):
"Let me know how everything goes. If there's nothing else that can be done, give me a call and we can put her tuition (remember, this isn't even his employee, but an employee's fiancee) on my corporate Amex, and we'll work with Chuck (company accountant) to figure out how we can handle it all on the back end."
I realize you can be cynical too, and look at this akin to the FAANGs offering laundry, daycare, etc., with the ultimate goal being "the less time you spend doing these things, the more you spend making us money", and there are of course aspects of that, but this was also very human and going above and beyond (like I could never in any world imagine a situation where your boss says "We can pay your partner's tuition and then we'll figure out payroll deductions or something to get it reconciled").
Loyalty to people still has significant returns, _especially_ when you are specific with what you want and take control of how your interactions should work.
When I started my own business, a few-times-former employer became a client. The way they interacted with me changed dramatically overnight -- the CxOs treated me as a peer versus an employee. Was very strange to experience and a very welcome change.
It's not unlimited, but it exists.
That's not to say it's _much_ of a benefit, but if the only thing a job gives me is a market-rational amount of dollars and health benefits in exchange for life-hours, the invisible hand ensures I can find that virtually anywhere.
The baseline is absence of disloyalty, which does not mean "stay aboard despite lower pay or benefits" but simply not cheating the organization you are (or were) part of. An employer who has to distrust every move of their employees will inevitably be a terrible employer to work at. No matter how hard they try not to be.
Not going below that baseline won't magically protect you from bad employers, but going below will inevitably turn any employer you work at into a bad employer, at least if enough of your peers aren't above following your example.
The "reward for loyalty" varies greatly per company, but I would like to see it defined. I have worked on 12 companies since I started my career, some of them would probably rank very high for your definition and others very low.
1- research
2- teaching
3- service to the community
So there's simply no place for loyalty in employer-employee relationships. One side pays money or whatever, the other is delivering the job being done. That's all.