The Hindu Business Line : <I>The two faces of loyalty </I>

Yin-yang, hot-cold, soft-hard. Taoists would agree that opposites and contradictions are many in life. One such divergence is about managing employees so as to ensure not only high productivity in the present, but also in the future.

"Employees are quite charged and motivated during the first three or five years in an organisation. After this period they become complacent. They begin to love what they have created or achieved and begin to build walls around themselves. They fear new ideas and resist changes." Thus writes Ajit Rao in `The Tao of Loyalty,' from Response (www.indiasage.com) . The key challenge, therefore, for today's businesses is, "How to keep creativity and innovativeness alive and kicking in the organisation at all levels and at all times?"

Rao rues that many corporate strategies ignore the people element. "People are more often than not looked at as an expense-line item." If, instead, you want to involve people in the framing and delivery of your strategy, you need to learn how to measure and manage the loyalty levels of employees, insists the author.

He identifies two faces of loyalty, viz. attitudinal or emotional, and behavioural. The former is about "the positive disposition that an employee has towards the organisation, the `feel-good' element or how psychologically wedded the employee is to the organisation". And the latter relates to `the stated future behaviour'.

Be warned that employees lacking loyalty can erode your brand equity and drive customers away! Combining the two faces of loyalty, Walker Information has developed a 2x2 matrix to segment employees. The `high risk' category is low on both counts, emotional and behavioural. Those high on emotional but low on behavioural loyalty are `accessible'. The opposite, that is, employees with high behavioural but low emotional loyalty, are the `trapped' lot.

The `trapped' ones can be spotted in most organisations. They don't feel emotionally loyal and `will also not move out of the organisation'. Rao explains: "These employees are probably contributing just the minimum to the organisation to avoid being fired." Well-written, and well-produced, with crisp graphics, grids and cartoons.

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

D. Murali

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