The Key to Employee Loyalty: Pride

Simply put, if employee loyalty is a major concern for your organization right now, the most important element you should address is pride. If employees aren’t proud of their organization and the work they do, staff retention and work quality will suffer. When it comes to organizational culture, while employee satisfaction indicators such as happiness and wellness are important, pride is what often plays the deciding factor in determining whether employee engagement is positive or not. 

The last two years have presented new challenges for organizations in terms of creating and/or maintaining strong workplace cultures. A major element and driver of organizational pride is employee pride. Are employees proud to share where they work with their friends and family? Are they personally proud of their contributions to your organization and how it drives your mission? Their sense of pride is what will allow you to retain their commitment and continue to grow as an organization.

Telltale symptoms that your employees aren’t feeling proud of their work or your organization include unwanted turnover, a disjointed employee experience, and a low sense of employee empowerment and recognition. While these symptoms may start as ripples in team and work engagement, if left to fester, they can turn into major negative trends that affect your bottom line. 

How employee pride drives success

According to the recent WorkProud Study: How Pride Drives Business Value for Organizations, employees with high individual pride are 10 times more likely to be highly satisfied with their jobs, and employees with high organizational pride are 24 times more likely to stay at their current job. While happiness and wellness certainly influence retention and productivity, the study found that pride is what motivates employees to stay and give their best work. There are five elements that the research study explored when determining whether an organization has either an elevated or diminished sense of workplace pride:

• The impact on engagement: How organizational pride affects retention and how individual pride affects satisfaction.
• Intrinsic drive: The feeling a person gets from knowing their work has made a positive impact on others.
• Culture and external validation: How company culture influences and affects an individual’s sense of pride, whether they are proud of their own work or not. This includes respect for employees and empowerment in the workplace.
• The influence of remote work arrangements: The potential effects and correlations between employee pride and remote flexibility (or lack thereof).
• Recognition: The quality and variety of recognition that individuals receive with respect to individual and company pride. 

In terms of recognition and employee fulfillment specifically, the study found that “when the quality of employee recognition is consistently high, it is associated with strong individual pride 82% of the time and with strong company pride 75% of the time.” 

Addressing your employees’ pride head on

If your organization is suffering from some of the above telltale signs, there are four key areas you should be laser-focused on addressing:

• Make employee pride a deliberate priority: Workplace pride challenges won’t fix themselves. In fact, if not addressed, they have the real potential to grow deeper roots which are much harder to pull. Improving employee pride needs a commitment from senior leadership and adoption at all levels of management in order to be successful.
• Create an environment that encourages and celebrates recognition: The WorkProud Study found that recognition and feedback that align with individuals, teams, and organizational results directly contribute to an individual’s sense of purpose and pride. A culture of recognition is an important requirement for positively impacting an organization’s bottom line. 
• Recognize commitment and success regularly: Recognition cannot merely celebrate extraordinary moments. It also has to consistently champion everyday work that exhibits quality and engagement. Recognition and retention are very much related, so to keep good employees, recognize them on a daily or weekly basis. Increased staff engagement will follow.
• Assess and benchmark your progress: Where does your team stand with it comes to workplace pride and culture? Using industry benchmarks—the WordProud Study is a great place to start—determine where improvements need to be made and what progress looks like.

If you’re not yet focusing on whether or not your employees are proud to be a part of your organization and proud of the work they do, it’s time to start today. The WorkProud® Technology Platform guides organizations in creating cultural alignment between their core values and their employees’ pride and engagement. Learn more about where your organization’s culture stands with respect to workplace pride by talking about your company’s specific situation with a WorkProud Expert.