Company Loyalty

Discussion in 'Miscellaneous' started by Amaris, Jul 31, 2010.

  1. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I was just thinking about the state of our economy, how many corporations are treating their employees, the need for absolute profit over the well-being of the employee (and the customer as well), and I was wondering, does company loyalty still exist? Are any of you loyal to your business, and if so, what keeps you loyal?

    I'll start: When I was working for Dell (what I consider the greatest job I ever had), I was very loyal. I believed that the company and I benefited one another. If I worked harder and smarter, the company made a greater profit, and if the company made a greater profit, it would ensure my employment and future benefits, and so that cycle would lead to more success for both myself and the company.

    Unfortunately, I, along with 8800 employees around the world, was laid off because of upper level management shenanigans. It didn't matter how hard or how smart I worked, it didn't matter how well I performed. I was loyal, but the company was not, and sold many of us down the river in a fit of fiscal expedience. Before Dell, I was very careful about loyalty, because most of the places I worked for were just penny ante places that didn't care anyway. Since I was let go from Dell, the idea of loyalty to a company is just too much risk, and I'm not sure I could invest that kind of devotion into a company again.

    So that's my story, what's yours?
     
  2. Snaploud

    Snaploud Admiral Admiral

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    I'm of two minds on the subject:

    Mind #1: Your relationship with your company is like your relationship with any other person. You build trust or lose trust over time. A bad break-up will make you think you'll never find a good relationship again. A callous firing will do the same. Every relationship is different just as every company is different. Loyalty can exist in the same way any good relationship can exist.

    Mind #2: It's a freaking job. The higher-ups are always going to be making decisions that have little or nothing to do with your inherent value. You have just got to roll with the punches and keep fighting. Loyalty is just another word for fulfilling the terms of your contract. No more. No less.
     
  3. Kestra

    Kestra Admiral Premium Member

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    Everyone's ultimately going to do what is best for them, and take care of themselves. Company loyalty is a nice idea and you shouldn't intentionally try to screw over your company, but the reality is that you need to look after your own interests because o one else is going to. There are some businesses out there that will go out of their way to help their employees, but blind trust in something like that is too big of a risk and things could change at any moment.
     
  4. Jetfire

    Jetfire Guest

    Well my trust within the last year was broken with one company and I no longer buy from them and the other I broke their trust by leaving and going to the company that broke my trust in them...I do buy from the company that I broke trust with mainly because it was a stupid move on my part to leave the way I did.
     
  5. Naira

    Naira Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I believe that company "loyalty" can only exist in small businesses. When it comes to a large corporation, the numbers are more important than the people.
     
  6. iguana_tonante

    iguana_tonante Admiral Admiral

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    I suppose my position is a little different since I work in academia. I work hard, I work well, I work above and beyond the call of duty, but that has much more to do with loving what I do than to any "loyalty" to the institute. My main loyalty is to science.

    I suppose you could say that I'm loyal to the people in my collaboration, in that I would never divulge results that are shared confidentially, or take the credit for someone else's work.

    But I go where my work takes me: if another institute would offer me a better remunerated or more interesting job, I'm would go in a heartbeat. In the grand scheme of things in my life, the place where I work is rather irrelevant.
     
  7. Bloodwhiner

    Bloodwhiner Commodore Commodore

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    I was loyal for 19 years but then dumped (along with many experienced employees) last year in favor of two young kids I had trained. It was all a cost savings move.

    Of course the two kids have now left the company of their own accord.

    I'll show loyalty to whoever pays my salary because that is in my nature, but it will never be quite the same either.
     
  8. Jetfire

    Jetfire Guest

    ^
    I know some companies feel that the bottom line is everything but instead of paying long time employees what they are do and treating them with a moniker of respect they hire younger, pay less and takeaway or let go those seasoned employees...and they don't seem to care about turnover of these younger employees or the cost to train them.
     
  9. TheBrew

    TheBrew Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I'm loyal to my company in that I like the people I work with and my bosses plus the CEO is a fan of Pinky and the Brain. But while I won't go and betray the company, that doesn't mean I'm not going to look out for my bottom line.
     
  10. Nerdius Maximus

    Nerdius Maximus Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    This. Anyone who blindly trusts that a big corporation is looking out for his best interests is a fool.
     
  11. judge alba

    judge alba senior street judge Commodore

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    I tried being loyal to the company I work at for the past 21 years only to find out that three people doing the same job as me have started on 25% more then me and are due a rise end of august. reason I aint getting a rise?

    they claim I am on a seperate pay line which means my pay has been capped for the next three years and the old timers will be told in writing end of the month
     
  12. Warp Coil

    Warp Coil Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    No loyalty. I generally like the company I work for, and I like a lot of my co-workers. I appreciate my salary and benefits. At the moment I'm very appreciative of the company's tuition reimbursement plan, which is paying for 80% of my Master's degree. I feel compelled to stay with the company long enough to let them pay for my higher education, but after that, I wouldn't think twice about looking for jobs elsewhere.
     
  13. gturner

    gturner Admiral

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    I've programmed assembly lines at both Dell and IBM.

    Your mistake was being loyal to Dell. As you probably know, one of the fundamental ways that Dell established its cost advantage over rivals like IBM was to avoid the mistakes made by IBM, such as IBM's massive inventory (off topic) and crushing pension burden. The easiest way to do that is to:

    (off topic) Not have any significant inventory. When you order a Dell, they bill your card and use the money to order the parts to build your computer - Dell only owns the parts for three or four hours while the computer is being assembled. This pushes the inventory costs onto their suppliers. In contrast, when I was doing an IBM line in Research Triangle Park, the IBMers mentioned that they had a huge warehouse nearby full of PC-jrs.

    Don't incure large pension costs. Dell likes to hire people fresh out of college or off the streets, works them like dogs while they're still bright-eyed, idealistic, and thrilled to rent a nice apartment, and then kicks most of them out the door before any serious raises or retirements come due. In their Nashville assembly plant most of the line workers were temps from North Africa. How Dell can even find North Africans in Nashville is beyond me, but they had busloads of them. But Dell wasn't content with just that, no. They fired them all every few months and then rehired them so that none of them could become full-time employees.

    The only large PC company that compete with Dell on a cost basis is Lenovo, out of mainland China. I assume the Chinese looked at the various PC companies, figured out which was the most competitive, and then copied their business model. That made them competitive in laptops but not desktops because desktops cost much more to ship across an ocean, so Lenovo bought IBM's assembly plants. I'm not sure if they're having much success because IBM employees wouldn't be very open to working in a Chinese sweat shop.

    So yes, Dell is very good at motivating their young employees, but Dell is successful because they're ruthlessly efficient. If the spreadsheet says they should discard a bunch of workers, then goodbye workers.
     
  14. Teelie

    Teelie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Definitely. I'm not loyal to any employer that doesn't earn it. And only small employers are capable of that. Large corporations are by their very nature incapable of fostering any loyalty with their employees for an extended period of time. Once the bottom line comes in and it's time to cut costs, they look at the lower level employees first and work their way up. Instead of cutting the excess fat from management that might make a difference (ie; their jobs).
     
  15. Rii

    Rii Rear Admiral

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    Loyalty is antithetical to capitalism.
     
  16. JiNX-01

    JiNX-01 Admiral Admiral

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    Old timers?
    Or long-term employees?

    If it's the former, you might have an age discrimination case.
     
  17. Serial thread killer

    Serial thread killer Vice Admiral Premium Member

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    I do the best Job I can do, but as they are quite happy for me to be crippled in a few years time simply because they will not carry out a simple repair to a machine. I would not give it a moments thought if someone offered me another job,I would be off like a shot.
     
  18. Mary Ann

    Mary Ann Knitting is honourable Admiral

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    Agreed, though an exception may be a larger company which is in private hands, such as the one my father worked for. Of course, when he was hired in the early 1960s this company could still limit their work force to only Roman Catholics, so it really was a different era. My dad worked for them for almost 30 years until his retirement.

    I think of myself as loyal to my job rather than to my employer, which is the county council, especially due to the nature of my job. However with all the public spending cuts the new UK government is planning to do I don't know how much longer I'll have this job. The irony is that the services we provide will be needed more than ever.
     
  19. Holdfast

    Holdfast Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    A company is there to make money. Anything they do to make you happy working for them is not done out of altruism, but to convince you to stay working for them for as they regard you as an asset.

    In that context, loyalty to your employer certainly has a role to play. By being loyal to a company you preserve your perks, salary, opportunities, etc, etc. But it is not the same sort of loyalty you might show someone/something that you do not have a monetary relationship with. I leave it to another thread to debate whether altruistic loyalty is ever possible. But company loyalty is quite clearly bought loyalty, similar to what you might expect from a mercenary to his boss, and so always susceptibility to a cost-benefit financial calculus. To behave any other way towards your employer is I think to do yourself a disservice and leave yourself open to exploitation.

    I have only two more working days of being directly employed by an organisation. The calculus no longer added up in favour of staying in the job. :D
     
  20. Robert Maxwell

    Robert Maxwell memelord Premium Member

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    I was loyal to my last employer. Not a mistake I will make again. They sold us a bunch of crap about how they were going to "invest in the employees" and then they shitcanned a third of the company.

    I like the job I have now. I like (some of) the people I work with. The guys running the place are sharp. But they've also been changing things around, let some people go, etc. I'll stay with this job until I find something I like better or I think this place is going downhill. Last time, I didn't jump ship while the company was in dire straits. If that happens here--if the company has a bad year or a run of bad quarters--I will ditch as fast as I can rather than wait for the ax to fall.