Workers of the world, wake up.
In the last decade or so, hundreds of thousands of American workers have been “downsized” or “delayered”-those tired corporate euphemisms for dumping people-out of jobs in the implacable new lean-and-mean world of global business competition.
It’s not only the incompetents and also-rans who are being weeded out. In industry’s frenzy to cut costs, expand profits and elevate stock prices to assuage grumpy shareholders and gimlet-eyed Wall Street analysts, huge numbers of perfectly good, hard-working employees have been thrown out on the street.
They’re gone, leaving colleagues in shock and fear and a legacy, at least as the conventional wisdom has it, that corporate loyalty in the American work force is in sharp decline.
Something structural does seem to be happening but the evidence is anecdotal, conversational. It doesn’t square with surveys like a Gallup Organization finding last year that 39 percent of American workers are “completely” satisfied with their jobs. Add those who said they were “somewhat” satisfied, and the figure zooms to 86 percent.
Similarly, a 1992 national sampling of 3,718 individuals by the Families and Work Institute found 64 percent saying they felt “extremely” or “very” loyal to their employers and another 29 percent “somewhat” loyal.
Poll respondents also said they were working harder than ever, feeling burnout, and worried that their health and retirement benefits were being cut. So there is a certain sourness out there.
But if all those people feel all that satisfied in their jobs, shouldn’t it be assumed that they’re loyal to their company and its goals?
Maybe, maybe not.
“Loyalty,” as it turns out, is an elusive concept, especially as it relates to the workplace.
Historically, American workers have responded with spirited loyalty to the clarion call of visionary leaders-men like Thomas J. Watson of IBM, Col. Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Alfred E. Sloan of General Motors.
You can still find some of that in today’s entrepreneurial society. Billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft, alone with a vision at a computer keyboard 25 years ago, was essentially no different from Henry Ford, tinkering in his workshop on his “quadricycle” three-quarters of a century earlier.
Most of us are not like that, but we can buy into the vision.
There can be-has been-a sense of sharing, of purpose, of meaning in life, along with the payoff: Raise the kids, pay off the mortgage, slide eventually into a retirement of golf or pinochle. The American dream.
Analyze the dream, however, and you find a few ragged edges.
More often, especially at the blue-collar level, workers focused their loyalties on an individual boss (“I’d go to the ends of the Earth for that man”) or gave their fealty to a labor union, or to their own well-formed mission in life-teachers, for example. Some had nowhere to turn; many African-Americans were routinely, cruelly marginalized.
So: Was “loyalty,” the confident notion of a career-long predictability, really all it was cracked up to be?
Pride in performance, yes. Loyalty, maybe not.
“If the company really cared all that much about individuals, we wouldn’t have unions,” said Susan Whitbourne, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who was involved in a poll that spanned workers’ changing views over 22 years, from 1966 to 1988.
“Loyalty is a really old-fashioned value,” Whitbourne added. “People don’t talk about loyalty anymore. We’ve become more focused on the self, fulfilling our own personal needs. How your behavior affects the corporation has been chucked by the wayside in favor of personal actualization.
“You really see a major shift in peoples’ sense of whom they owe something to. They feel they’re just as likely to be shafted by their companies, so if something better comes along, they’re going to grab it.”
Whitbourne doesn’t agree that this is altogether a good development-she cites a certain resultant emptiness of spirit-but she’s right. Mention “loyalty” to industrial psychologists or human resources types or opinion researchers, and their response makes you think you’re two sandwiches short of a picnic.
“Every CEO, every annual report makes reference to `people being our most important asset.’ It sounds good but I don’t think more than a handful of CEOs act as if they really believe that’s true,” said Tony Rucci, executive vice president for administration for the giant Sears merchandise group.
When Rucci arrived at Sears in October 1993, he found the company reeling. Only a few months earlier, Sears, long known for its paternalism, had eliminated 50,000 jobs and laid off 31,000 people.
Now, newly slimmed down, Sears has thought long and hard about its corporate culture. Its conclusion: To survive the way it wants to, it must do no less than engender a fresh sense of commitment among every one of its 300,000 employees.
“Historically, we’ve been top-down, hierarchical, focused on uniformity,” Rucci said. “It’s not that we’re negative about this company’s heritage, but that’s absolutely antithetical to creating an environment where people feel their ideas really are welcome-and that includes the freedom to disagree.
“Getting managers to behave differently is difficult. Very shortly we’re going to be talking to our top 100 managers to get them engaged in what we want to be known for, but we’re not going to just leave it at that. Over four months, we’ll be asking all 300,000 of our people what we should do differently, or stop doing, to restore Sears to its rightful place of prominence in U.S. industry.”
Rucci and others draw a distinction between “loyalty,” with its echo of a paternalistic past, and a new ethos of “commitment.”
This gets a little tricky. A basic aspect of “commitment” is that it puts the onus on employees to think actively about what they must do to accommodate themselves to rapid change.
Implicit in all this is the idea-surely disquieting to many but increasingly a mantra for managers peering into the uncertainty of the next century-that if the worker has taken a hard look at where he or she fits in and doesn’t like what they see, they’d better assume their name is on a hit list somewhere, extract what free retraining he can and be prepared to move somewhere else.
“It’s building a new mentality-that we’re all free agents in a disorienting time,” observed Joe Jannotta, executive vice president of the consulting firm of Right-Jannotta-Bray.
“We talk about making your own `work life.’ People are moving around more. There are fewer 30-year careers, more five-year modules. In the past you were a good soldier. Now you have to consider other options. Companies like Ford and Chrysler are encouraging this and saying, `We’ll help you do it.’ “
Most corporations, Jannotta asserts, “believe this is ultimately going to be more positive because those employees who do remain, having gone through a process of self-examination and having written their own career development plan, will be more strongly motivated.
“Those are decisions that people like my father and grandfather arrogated to someone else-and the truth of the matter is that they weren’t always taken care of.”
That Draconian call for self-reliance might be all well and good for middle managers who are capable of taking a cold-eyed look at where they fit in the marketplace. But how does it compute for the vast mass of middle-class and blue-collar workers who, the human race being what it is, simply are never going to progress beyond a certain level?
“It’s a major concern for corporate America,” Jannotta agreed. “As changing technology drives old skills out, there’s a major disenfranchisement.”
“It’s a big problem,” chimes in industrial psychologist John Orr of the consulting firm of Rogala and Associates in Oak Brook. “Companies are trying to bring those people along. What you see is an effort to make them more a part of the business than before.”
At the headquarters of electronics giant Motorola in suburban Schaumburg-where the concept of two-way loyalty between the corporation and the work force is unabashedly viewed as central to everything-all of this corporate retrofitting seems a little like reinventing the wheel.
Competing fiercely around the world at the leading edge of technological change, Motorola has avoided massive restructuring, downsizing, delayering and all the other items in the litany of industrial misery.
With its legendary emphasis on quality through constant retraining and team-building, it has won worldwide renown as a demanding but good place to work.
It didn’t just happen that way.
“What’s distinctive about us is that we have a very long-term view and we see our employees as our greatest asset. Constant respect for people predates my coming here 17 years ago-it’s been around since the very beginning,” said Glenn Gienko, corporate vice president for human resources in Motorola’s cellular phone division.
“There’s no doubt that the level of international competition is intensifying and that the workplace is getting more stressful and demanding, but that’s no excuse for saying you see people as an expendable asset.
“I’m not sure there’s anything new about this. There are no silver bullets here, no miracle cures to instantly increase the loyalty of the work force. It’s just common sense.”
Of course it is, observes Whitbourne, the University of Massachusetts psychologist.
“If your career is very important to you, it’s kind of nice to know that it has meaning,” she said. “After all, it’s where you spend most of your waking hours.
“I remember when Kodak laid off so many people (10,000 in the summer of 1993). For a long time, working for Kodak defined who you were. All that went right down the tubes. You talk to those folks, even those who weren’t let go, and they’ve really hit bottom.”
And guess whom Kodak, after three restructurings failed to end its slump, decided to bring in? For the past year, its CEO has been none other than 54-year-old George Fisher, whose previous job was CEO of Motorola.
Is there the start of a trend here? One of the legacies Fisher left behind is a Motorola byword called “life/work balance.”
The idea, Gienko said, is that a good employee is someone who is healthy and fit, a good parent, an active member of the community. To that end, Motorola has set up such employee-friendly items as fitness centers, “wellness” programs for detecting ills ranging from high blood pressure to cancer, and day-care centers for employees’ children aged six weeks to six years.
“These sorts of things have long been thought of as `nice’ to have,” he said. “Well, wrong. They’re a `must have.’ It’s the only way that as a corporation, and as a society, we can assure ourselves of an excellent and loyal work force for today and tomorrow. You can feel loyal.”
Loyal. What a funny old-fashioned word.
