#7 Loyalty At Work

Is employee loyalty a relic of the past in this day and age? The answer is a resounding Yes if you ask some of my friends.

"Money talks baby... " they eloquently put it. All talk about values of loyalty, service and oneness with your employer are all just sentimental rubbish from a long gone era. Even the Japanese are starting to break away from those values, what more we who aren't Japanese and are of a much recent generation.In any case, corporations hire and fire on the basis of merits and performance these days. Do well and you go up, screw up and you go out. No place for sentiment in the corporate jungle. It would seem your Key Performance Index (KPI) will always outweigh your years of service.

I ask myself if this is indeed true. Indeed, I have known people who’ve service their employers for decades only to be laid off the minute profit margins were thinning. Corporations inevitably take care of the bottom line first before taking care of its staff. Yet, a big part doesn’t really want to agree with all of that – for very personal reasons.

I have been serving the same company, working for the same boss for the past 6 years of my working life. Many people have expressed surprise and ask me when I plan to make a move. Unlike the rest of my friends, I work for an obscure little engineering company. I work with a boss who is both the manager and owner of the company. Work gets done in a very informal (or chaotic) and personal way. This same boss helped me in a very big way with the last leg of my undergraduate studies, when I had not enough cash to continue. If you would understand my background – my own relatives refused to help me when I needed help the most. But this man helped me, even when I was a perfect stranger. Out of gratefulness and gratitude, I have served him loyally. I gave him and my work my personal dedication. And in response, gave me significant pay raises and made it a point to personally mentor me – coaching and imparting me with whatever skill, knowledge or wisdom he had. I never thought I would have ever learnt this much in the short space of 6 years.

But sometimes I wonder to myself, how long will this continue? Will it not be a matter of time before I hit a plateau? What happens then? Do I leave an pursuit other things – things that will help me continue to grow? Or do I stay on and continue serving this man? Is it right to leave after what he has done for me? Is it right to leave after all that mentoring and coaching? And if I stay, how long more do I stay? My dilemma isn’t about loyalty to a corporation like my friends, but loyalty to a person. How far should it go?

They say you shouldn’t leave it up to your boss or employer to chart your career for you. Shape the life you want to have. And so I ask myself “Is there more out there for me? Is there something else that should be doing? Am I limiting myself by staying? Or is staying the better thing to do?” I know how to ask the questions, but finding the answer is proving much harder. Everyone has an opinion, but no one knows for sure how things really do turn out till it happens. “In his heart Man plans his way, but the Lord determines his step.” said King Solomon. He sure knew a thing or two about life.

Am I at a plateau? In a way yes. While the first few years of work felt like being in the Land of Oz, constantly bumping into new things, the last year or so became more of a repetition of things I’ve already done before. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. In a way, it means that I am fully competent in my job. But it also means that I’m running out of new experiences – and with that comes the risk of slipping into years of complacency, doing the things you already know how to do over and over again. I call that the corporate limbo land. Not going up, not going down, just there. Is that a bad thing? Again, I don’t know. Is contentment and happiness found in constantly achieving more and more, accumulating more and more or learning more and more? Or is it by training your heart to accept and be happy with the things that you already have without wishing you had more. Is there a way to combine these two things?

Frankly, I don’t know.