Knowing how to instill employee loyalty in your team is vital for a project to succeed. It means being able to keep your team together and focused on tasks, as well as inspiring confidence in leadership decisions and a willingness to give their maximum effort to see the project through.
Employee loyalty also means that, after spending time and money on improving someone’s skills, they wish to stay at an organization and work for them rather than move to a competitor, even if it means turning down a pay increase.
Benefits of employee loyalty:
- Greater effort
- Support for decision-making
- Desire to stay with the organization
- Positive promoter of organization to contacts
- Helping out fellow team members
Considering the benefits to an organization and a specific project, employee loyalty is an extremely valuable asset, so here we’ll show you some of the best ways to enhance it.
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- Be clear about your values from the start
Employee loyalty is a two-way street; you have to give what you expect to get back. For instilling loyalty, it is important to let it be known at the start of your time together that you will support the employee with whatever they need and that you want to see them grow and flourish. It is no good talking about expecting loyalty if you are not willing to offer the same in return.
- Engage with your team on decisions
While it is a leader’s job to take the big decisions, having a bottom-up or horizontal approach to sourcing ideas and knowledge can also be beneficial for making the right calls. Another advantage is that involving employees in the decision-making process gives them ownership of the direction you’re taking and improves their loyalty by making them feel like they are valued.
- Let employees know how important they are to the organization
Creating a culture of inclusivity, i.e. “we’re all in this together” is helped by keeping employees informed of the bigger picture for the organization. It can be easy to feel removed from this if they are just focused on their own tasks, but by relating the company’s progress directly to their own work on a project, employees can see how important they are to everything that happens. One way of increasing this transparency is by using project management software to make communication and the sharing of information easier.
- Be fair in salary negotiations
It is natural that HR departments and managers are going to be much more skilled at salary negotiations than individual employees, simply because of the fact that they do it more often. It might seem to make sense for organizations to use this disparity and unfamiliarity with the process to squeeze the margins on what they pay an employee and get a better deal for themselves. However, though this might work in the short-term, eventually that employee will feel cheated, as if all that mattered was paying them less rather than valuing what they brought to the organization properly.
- Build a bond beyond work
While many gurus complain that meetings and interactions shouldn’t “waste time” by veering off the subject matter, the simple fact is that human bonding has to contain an element of personal sharing and cannot solely be achieved by just being professional colleagues. Building employee loyalty depends a lot on feeling a connection beyond purely doing your tasks to get paid and so small talk or getting to know who someone is beyond their professional function is very important for instilling loyalty.
