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At first glance it seems like a remarkably positive statistic. In a study on employee loyalty conducted by the Walker Information Global network and Hudson Institute, exactly half of nearly 10,000 employees surveyed agreed that their organization is “interested in developing people for the long term” and not just one’s current job. Of course, this does seem quite significant in light of the huge “Loyalty is Dead” movement so omnipresent the last 10-15 years. Consider: employees standing up for their employers, believing in them because they had shown a propensity to believe in them. Astonishing, a kind of miracle.

But I couldn’t help wondering what about the other poor souls stuck in the other 50% block. Just the way life is? Bad luck, tough roll of the die? Traditional business model, to be assumed and taken for granted?

Even if true, the “other” 50% still sheds a poor light on the moral behavior, not to mention savvy, of too many of today’s employers. The guiding light of the 80’s and 90’s seems to have been “Chew ‘em up, use ‘em up, spit ‘em out.” Though these new figures may now suggest that such insensitive, supra-pragmatic mindsets may not be as pervasive as we had thought, half of all employers out there nonetheless apparently do not care one whit what happens to even its most dedicated workers. Small wonder the survey could only earmark a third of all the American employees it studied as “truly loyal to their organization.” This percentage ranked on a worldwide scale below such relatively undeveloped countries as Colombia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

No, American companies are not required to exercise moral obligations to its workers in the form of long term career development, though given the day-in, day-out toil and commitment generated by those workers, one might attempt to mount a reasonable argument to the contrary. Add the fact that it can be very, very difficult to look for another job when one's entire workday is consumed at one particular locale, i.e., the employee has effectively locked him/herself up, offering the employer a form of de facto loyalty. Shouldn’t the employer be obligated to some of form of loyalty in return?

In terms of pragmatism, here we have persons learning and honing not only the particulars of a job but the overall mission and objectives of the entire organization. Employees also create, build, cement customer relationships on an ongoing basis, keeping the connection with the employer’s lifeblood alive and healthy. How does it make sense to throw such persons out, or not seek out ways to keep them growing in the organization and getting better at what they do, i.e., grooming them for other valuable internal functions?

The survey’s results thus could’ve read, less optimistically, this way: “50% of employees today agree that their organization is NOT AT ALL interested in developing people for the long term, only for their current job.” That would be a demoralizing way to phrase it but an accurate one just the same. Individual managers in such organizations can of course change this by taking it upon themselves to develop their own subordinates, regardless of company polices or culture. That would be a brick-by-brick method for shifting future loyalty survey results in the right direction.