Right hiring or right support: what does your company need?
Personal work ethic can be conducive or corrosive to Employee Commitment
Are your employees committed?
An employee’s commitment encompasses a set of moral principles and work ethic that underpin their actions and ability to flourish at work. They comprise of traits like reliability, dedication, productivity, cooperation, character, integrity, a sense of responsibility, an emphasis on quality, discipline, teamwork, professionalism, respect, and determination, to name just some. Clearly, these are good employees to have. But do you measure these traits? Do your employees even nurture these?
What drives employee commitment?
Employee commitment can be thought of as one of the prerequisites to flourishing. It fuels three other important aspects of employee performance – coworker dynamic and employee engagement within teams, and satisfaction with the job. So, what drives employee commitment? Well, personal work ethic plays a pivotal part! Employees with a good work ethic tend to be more committed and dedicated¹. Research reveals that work ethic is associated with a sense of responsibility, commitment to quality, discipline and teamwork among employees driving productivity².
Further research reinforces this, showing that employees with comparatively high work ethic have a turnover rate of 10% whereas employees with lower work ethic experienced a turnover rate of 33%. That's 3.3x less³. This also means that the company benefits by spending fewer resources in order to retain those employees.
Prioritising work ethic before and after hiring
Seek to recruit employees with good personal work ethic, provide the right working conditions and let them drive your company with a flourishing mindset.
However, good commitment alone can't be taken for granted, and certainly isn't fixed. A toxic work environment will, over time, wear down even the most committed employees. Employment that may have begun with a very high personal work ethic, can easily be eroded over time in a work environment that fails to deliver on basic elements which support employee commitment and engagement.
As we move on from the “job for life” expectation of the pre-Baby Boomer generation into the "15 jobs in a lifetime” expectation of Millennials⁴, some erosion of personal work ethic and commitment is expected. Companies aren’t offering “jobs for life” anymore, so employees have backed away from their “commitment for life” ethos, an ethos present in employees with a high personal work ethic.
This all helps explain why, over time, organisations are having to work harder to recruit, retain and manage the best talent. They have to actively develop and maintain working conditions that drive employee commitment.
SHAPE measures and tracks employee commitment, providing special insights on the loyalty, satisfaction and morale of employees. This helps companies make targeted interventions to strengthen employee commitment across organisation and set them on their path to flourishing.
__¹__Grabowski D, Chudzicka-Czupała A, Chrupała-Pniak M, Mello AL, Paruzel-Czachura M. Work ethic and organizational commitment as conditions of unethical pro-organizational behavior: Do engaged workers break the ethical rules? Int J Select Assess. 2019; 27: 193–202. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12241
__²__Grabowski D,Chudzicka-Czupała A, Stapor K (2021) Relationships between work ethic and motivation to work from the point of view of the self-determination theory. PLoS ONE 16(7): e0253145. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253145
__³__Saks, A., Mudrack, P., & Ashforth, B. (2009). The Relationship Between the Work Ethic, Job Attitudes, Intentions to Quit, and Turnover for Temporary Service Employees. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences-revue Canadienne Des Sciences De L Administration, 13, 226-236. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1936-4490.1996.TB00733.X.
__⁴__Meister, Jeanne. 2012. Forbes.
