Is Employee Loyalty Dead? The Deal Is Off

Look out the window right now. The cost of living goes up. Job prospects go down. And this isn’t just an AI thing. Employee loyalty, that old-school deal between a company and the people who work there, is gone. This episode kicks off a little mini-season about that broken relationship and our place in it.

Where Employee Loyalty Went

It didn’t start with ChatGPT. That was the loudest drop in the bucket, not the first one. It started decades ago, when shareholder value became priority number one.

When I was a kid I watched my dad buy stock. You held on to it for years, because you were there to help the company grow. Now hold times are measured in milliseconds. And share prices aren’t allowed to slide. There has to be an increase every quarter, or the most highly paid people in the building lose their jobs. Guess what? That’s going to motivate people a certain way.

My dad spent 35 years at the same company. That’s what employee loyalty used to look like. I can’t imagine anyone doing that now… and I don’t think they’d keep any of us that long anyway.

Return to Office Broke Trust in Both Directions

In the early 2000s, offshoring sent the development work overseas for a fraction of the cost. I was facilitating sessions at three in the morning, talking to a star-shaped telephone in the middle of a conference room. When we asked how we’d build a team we couldn’t even see, they told us, you’re smart people, you’ll figure it out.

Then the pandemic sent everyone home and proved you could be just as effective outside the office. Some people more. And suddenly the same companies said it wasn’t possible anymore.

Most employees believe return to office mandates are about trust and control. Not quality. Not productivity. If people take advantage of remote work, that breaks trust. But installing goofware in Teams to check if you’re in front of the camera breaks it too. Treat people like children who need a babysitter and you put a wall up between leadership and the people doing the work.

Some will say shareholders are the most important people in the room. Guess who builds the value they get paid on? The people who toil at it every day, for a salary that’s now a single-digit percentage of what some executives make. The deal isn’t even anymore. We can’t pretend it is.

AI Is the Knockout Punch for Employee Loyalty

AI started as a joke. Seven-legged people, faces out of a David Cronenberg acid trip. Now it’s integral to my work, and this genie isn’t going back in th