5 tips to increase employee loyalty and commitment

Every team manager will agree: keeping qualified, talented, devoted, committed, and loyal employees is one of the most important parts of their job.

The problem is the following: 87% of Human Resources managers state that increasing employee retention is one of their short and long-term priorities. Retaining your best employees is very important for several reasons. 

<<< Employee experience: employee satisfaction and retention >>>

On the one hand, likely, loyal, committed employees that work in the company for a long time are the most talented ones. Their knowledge and skills, backed by years of experience, guarantee they'll be some of the most productive members of your team. 

Moreover, these loyal employees are, probably, the ones that shape the culture of your company and help keep the team together. Since they have a lot of experience about how (and why) the company works, they can help other team members to keep focused on achieving the company's goals. 

At the same time, your senior employees have a lot of knowledge, skills, and experience related to the industry. Therefore, they can be a priceless asset when training new employees, optimizing the current processes of your team, or making other improvements in your company. 

<<< Committed employees: how to achieve it? >>>

In other words, not retaining your most talented employees can lead to a series of negative outcomes for your company: 

• Productivity gaps while you look for and train their substitutes. 
• Money loss due to any investment you made regarding the professional development of the lost employee. 
• Loss of the knowledge and experience your former employees had (that can harm your company doubly if they become competitors)
• There's no need to tell you that this will have an incredibly negative impact on your company. 

It's simple: you have all the reasons to keep your talented employees on board and growing in your company as well as the reasons not to lose them. So, how can you do this? By prioritizing employee loyalty. And, how can you increase employee loyalty? Encourage your company's growth by increasing employee loyalty. 

5 simple tips to increase employee loyalty

Employee loyalty is not a minor issue. Loyal employees are an important asset and help encourage the growth and income of your company. Therefore, if the growth of your company is a priority for you, you must devote some time to create a workplace that matches your employees' expectations to increase their loyalty. Here, you can find five simple tips to manage and increase employee loyalty. 

1. Align your employees with your company's vision

Modern employees have a purpose in their careers that goes beyond a paycheck. 

Even though making enough money is important, it's also likely that your employees aim at getting an intrinsic value of their experiences at your company. Actually, a study carried out in 2018 by WeSpire found out that employees belonging to Gen-Z usually prioritize purpose over salary when evaluating a job opportunity. 

There are two things you need to consider when providing this sense of purpose to your employees: 

First of all, you need to make sure that their professional vision is aligned with your company's. Basically, you need to know that your employees really care about what the company wants to do for the industry and the global community.

You should also make sure that your employees' ethical vision is also aligned with your company's. In general, you have many more chances of retaining employees who share the vision of your company in terms of social, environmental, and global responsibility. 

Aligning your employees with your company's vision and keep that alignment is a process that involves:  

• Communicating the importance of that alignment in the first place. 
• Developing and increasing the vision of your team collaboratively. 
• Keeping the communication constant and focusing on that vision as time goes by. 

2. Keep your processes standard and more agile

As a manager, one of your key tasks is guaranteeing that your employees can fulfill their tasks most efficiently and productively possible. To prepare the scenario for this productivity, you should standardize and optimize all the processes of your team. This means developing standard operative procedures and their corresponding documentation. 

The SOP documents your company should include are: 

• Clear, precise, and complete instructions to carry out specific tasks or processes.
• Information about who is in charge of fulfilling specific tasks. 
• Resource lists that will be used when your employees fulfill these tasks. 
• By creating a vision of your company, you'll want to allow your employees to give their opinion when developing their standard operative procedures.

3. Enable your employees

You should allow your employees to work at their best so that they are successful in their tasks and get purpose in their efforts. 

For new employees, an attractive and informative onboarding experience is vital. A complete onboarding process that allows new employees to start working right away can result in an 82% increase in employee retention. 

In general, enabling workers involves: 

• Identifying and eliminating obstacles.
• Adjusting and optimizing workflows and processes constantly.
• Looking for new tools and technologies constantly to maximize productivity. 
• Assigning team members the tasks that better suit their abilities, capabilities and knowledge. 

Your devoted employees want to put their effort into everything they do. If they can't do so for any reason, they can feel frustration, apathy, or even animosity towards the company; this, of course, doesn't encourage retention. 

However, if you do whatever you need to enable your employees, they will be able to focus on their work all the time, which will keep them committed and loyal to your company throughout the process. 

4. Empower your employees 

Make your employees feel empowered in the company is very important to keep them on board. 

Actually, 70% of employees assure that feeling empowered is a key factor to keep them committed and loyal to your company. Besides, 67% of them say that they are more willing to put all their effort into their job when managers make them feel empowered. 

Apart from allowing employees to fulfill the assigned tasks efficiently, empowering them means allowing them to "do everything they can" to add value to your company. This involves: 

• Giving them enough independence to do their best, even if that means diverting a little sometimes. 
• Being open to collaborate and take into account other efforts related to teamwork whenever it's necessary. 
• Asking for and listening to any suggestions or advice they can give you about the general organization of their work. 
• Showing your talented and dedicated employees that they have the power of making the company succeed. The feeling of being empowered will improve their loyalty and commitment to the company. 

Feeling empowered is key to improve employee loyalty. 

5. Be flexible with your employees

Flexibility at the workplace has become a very controversial issue in the last few years and, even more, nowadays.   

In general, 73% of employees state that flexibility increases their job satisfaction and 78% say that flexibility allows them to be more productive. Once more, both factors are very important for an employee to be loyal to the company. 

There are two key areas in which employees look for flexibility: where they work and when they work. 

As you already know, the COVID-19 pandemic has made millions of employees work from their homes. Somehow, quarantine has tied employers' hands: according to current information, several employees prefer working from home, even if they don't work at present; therefore, if your employees can work remotely without affecting productivity, you should allow them to do so. 

As regards working time, modern employees appreciate being able to work when they know they are most productive and not just during traditional business hours. If they can work better during three free hours than they would on a regular workday from 9 to 5, well... you should let them do so. 

Conclusion

If your employees don't feel appreciated for the work they do for your company, surely they'll start looking for another company that does. The need for prioritizing employee loyalty is something we can't stress enough.