What Are 8 Ways To Increase Employee Loyalty?

If you want employees who won’t go after other opportunities, you need to build employee loyalty. For your workers to remain loyal, they need to feel valued and appreciated. You need to build trust with your team members and your managers.

Exactly what you need for your employees to remain loyal will vary from business to business. Still, there are many simple ways to improve and maintain employee loyalty with no credit card required. It’s the common courtesies of a successful business world.

What Does Employee Loyalty Mean?

Employee loyalty is all about emotion. It’s what your employees feel for their job and your company and managerial styles. The more positive those emotions are, the less likely your employees will look for other jobs. Conversely, the more negative they are, the more likely they will start looking to move on to greener pastures.

To improve employee loyalty, you have to get on their emotional level and raise the positive while lowering the negative ones. You have to fundamentally understand what drives your team members’ emotions at work and use that to create a space that attracts loyal employees. That’s the only way to run a sustainable and successful business.

Before You Hire

While improving your employee loyalty will mainly be for your current workforce, there are a few things to consider when hiring new employees, either face-to-face or onboarding employees remotely.

Find People Who Aspire to Your Vision

What’s your company’s vision? Each company or business should have an idea that they strive for. While this may get lost in the day-to-day workplace, it’s something that you should consider when deciding on new hires.

When their values and ideals align with your business, maintaining that worker’s loyalty is more accessible from the get-go. Also, run a couple of personality tests to make sure they fit in with the rest of your team. There’s nothing more worse for morale, than employee tensions.

Referrals

Referrals are the best source for ROI for recruitment, and 45% of referrals will stay at a job longer than four years. Employee retention is important since the average worker switches jobs every four years. 

An employee referral program is a great way to increase employee loyalty, primarily when it works with everything else on this list. Happy employees are more willing to spread how good their job is and bring in more referrals. Many companies offer referral benefits and bonuses to help get referrals.

After You Hire Your Employee

When it comes to increasing employee loyalty with existing employees, here are some key areas where simple tricks can help them feel more positively towards their job.

Boost Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is the emotional commitment your worker has towards the company. Whether positive or negative, this is how the employee feels. It’s the foundation for employee loyalty. Unfortunately, with 80% of all employees not feeling engaged in the workplace globally, this is a big one for keeping your employees loyal.

In order to boost engagement, you need to treat your workers like adults and give them responsibilities within the operational structure of your company. Ways to increase employee engagement are:

• Recognize employees success
• Give your employees more control over their work
• Celebrate work anniversaries and employee milestones
• Give your loyal employees growth opportunities

Please read an article we produced on even more ways in which employee engagement can be increased.

Show Your Appreciation

In conjunction with employee engagement, a successful business should show its employees how much they appreciate the work they put in. It doesn’t have to be anything significant, but a little something to say thank you can go a long way to increase an employees’ loyalty. These include:

• Increase in salary
• Team benefits or gifts
• Company outing or party
• Thank you notes
• Training resources
• Shoutout in the weekly/monthly newsletter

Provide Constructive Feedback

For a loyal employee to have high job satisfaction, they have to know where they stand in your company. It’s just like letting your clients know what you will and won’t do. Likewise, your employees need the same thing from you.

Not providing feedback to employees means they will never have the knowledge to develop the skills to become the top talent for their employers. In addition, without feedback, employees don’t feel motivated, and productivity suffers as morale goes down.  

If you want to delve deeper into employee motivation then please read our full guide on employee motivation. 

Offer Incentives and Choices to Team Members

To help encourage loyalty among your workers, you should give them more accountability. They’re adults and are a part of your team. Companies that keep employees on a tight leash with what they can and can’t do as far as work tend to have a high turnover rate.

Help create a more positive environment by allowing your employees to learn something outside the narrow scope of your job. These workers could very well be the leaders of innovation and have excellent leadership potential.

Some options you can give them work really well in some cases, and some don’t. Tailor as needed to fit into your corporation. Options for giving them choices:

• Setting their working hours.
• Deciding whether to work in the office or remotely.
• Deciding when to work remotely.
• Let them decide what they want to do.
• Allow for more flexibility.

The other side of the coin is making sure you take care of them by ensuring they have everything they need to grow as professionals. If you can take a bit of weight off their shoulders then that can also improve loyalty and earn respect.

Incentives/benefits you can offer include:

• Cross-training
• Extra paid time off
• Recognition
• Rewards/Awards such as employee of the month
• Other professional development
• Profit-sharing
• Centralized rewards for better health and wellness

Also read: Ways In Which You Can Show Employees You Are Thankful

Open Door Policy

The employee experience can help increase loyalty, and that all starts when they can come to you, their employer, or their managers with their work-related issues. You increase loyalty by listening to them without getting angry, upset, or argumentative.

An open-door policy means you won’t discipline them for coming to you, and you won’t rat them out to their managers and other team members. An open-door approach is all about open, honest feedback and starting a discussion that can improve your corporation in ways you haven’t thought of before.

If you decide an open-door policy is for you, then make it crystal clear to your employees. They should know which channels of communication are available to them. This way, they can take advantage of having someone within your corporation to talk to.

While these types of policies can be very informal, it’s best to keep a summary of what you discussed so it can get reviewed and the correct action taken. You don’t want a lawsuit for wrongful discrimination because an employee repeatedly came to you about a problem you never solved.

Business/Company Actions

When it comes to your workforce as a whole and not the individual, there are still plenty of things employers can do to help improve loyalty in their employees. Things inside your corporation may have to change in order to keep your employees motivated.

Maintain Transparency

When you are open and honest with what’s happening inside your business, your team feels included, increasing their loyalty towards the company. Conversely, a manager who isn’t crystal clear about expectations inside an organization can cast a shadow over all the employees under them.

Your organization needs to find a mission statement. Then you need to inject that statement into every single one of the jobs in your company, as this also shows a willingness to be open and honest. The teams and departments you have will thank you for treating them as responsible adults.

Listen to Your Employees

It’s a great idea to encourage your workers to be open and honest, but it’s more than just that. First, you need to actively listen to your employees about the workplace, its people, and the issues they face within the organization.

Great leaders take responsibility for their team by treating everyone with respect, including listening to their team members. 74% of employees are better at their job when they feel heard, so it’s vital to regularly sit down with your team and see how your employees feel about their careers and the work they do.

Invest in Training

You need to support your employees on their career path, and the best way to do that is through training. Online resources, virtual classes, mentoring, coaching, or conferences are all ways to expand your employees’ skill sets and help with creating more productivity inside your organization.

It’s essential to have give and take which is vital for the benefit of your employees to know that you see them as an asset and want to help further their careers. Coming up with an employee development plan is an excellent start as it brings everyone in the organization to a higher standard.

Address Toxic Workers and Work Culture

Creating a company culture that’s inviting is a significant change, but it’s necessary if you want top talent. A person with the skills to do great things in the workplace will not look for employers who don’t support their team.

Workplace culture can create a great atmosphere to work in. Unfortunately, it can also make every worker in that place feel like they’re fighting a losing battle and watching the clock, waiting for the day to be over.

If there’s a rift between your management team and other team members, it’s time to get to the bottom of it. Turn into Sherlock Holmes and talk to everyone. Hear every side of the story and figure out the truth. Then take corrective action, so the toxic workers bringing your best employees down are cut from the business. 

Also read: The Most Effective Employee Retention Strategies for Keeping Your Best Talent

Takeaway's

It takes time and effort to improve employee loyalty. But, when you give your employees the support they want as well as the room to spread their wings, you’ll find that their focus shifts from where they’ll go next to being productive members of your crew.

Companies will get the best out of their employees by being open, honest, courteous, and drawing a hard line on what’s acceptable and not in the corporation. As long as you show you’re trying to change and become better as a business, the best that you have will stick around.

As you can see there is a relation between gestures that improve the loyalty of your employees and the employees that show up and have the most respect, recognition, appreciation, and honesty. It’s no wonder that businesses that adhere to these main goals are the powerhouses they are today.

Employee satisfaction is always key when we talk about loyalty within a company workforce and there are many different ways to maintain that satisfaction. One way is to ensure that employee pay records and pay stubs are correctly handled and that there is no hassle. 

Using our pay stub generator you can rest a little easier knowing that side of the business is all taken care of.