Here is a question for anyone who has sat through a company values workshop in the past five years...
Did the organisation that spent three hours explaining its commitment to “people first” also send a 6am redundancy email to 10% of the workforce six months later? Did the careers page promising “a place where you can grow” quietly remove its learning and development budget in the next quarter? Did the CEO who appeared in the culture video talking about “family” also announce a performance stack-ranking programme that fired the bottom 15%?
If you answered yes to any of those, and if you work in corporate employer branding, the honest answer is probably yes to at least one, then congratulations. You have witnessed the single most consequential shift in modern employment: the moment employees decided, without announcement or fanfare, to stop directing their loyalty upward and start directing it somewhere more deserving.
Your employees know the truth. Does your EVP? At Fathom we measure the "Credibility Gap" between your promise and their reality.
The interesting thing is that nobody noticed it happening in real time. It didn’t announce itself. There was no Great Disloyalty to match the Great Resignation. There were no viral LinkedIn posts declaring the end of career commitment. Employees simply looked at the employment relationship with clear eyes, conducted a quiet cost-benefit analysis, and redirected their loyalty - to their craft, their careers, their professional communities, their family, themselves - with the same calm efficiency that their employers had applied to the last three rounds of restructuring.
They were, in other words, paying attention. The problem is that most employer brands still aren’t.
The Contract Nobody Admitted Had Ended
Let’s start with some honesty about the history.
The version of employee loyalty that organisations are currently mourning - long tenure, deep commitment, a workforce that would genuinely go above and beyond because they believed in the institution - was not some timeless feature of human nature. It was a transaction. It existed because employers offered something in return: security, progression, a defined career ladder, and eventually a pension generous enough to make forty years in the same building feel like a reasonable deal.
That transaction began unravelling in the 1980s and was largely complete by 2010. Mass redundancies, outsourcing, delayering, the shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pensions, the casualisation of professional roles through contracting and gig structures - all of these were decisions made by organisations, for organisations, with the employment relationship treated as a cost to be optimised rather than a contract to be honoured.
Employees watched all of this. They adapted. They updated their mental models. They began, quite rationally, to treat the employment relationship the way the employment relationship had begun to treat them: as a series of transactions rather than a long-term commitment.
“Why on earth shouldn’t someone job-hob for better salaries? Serious question.”
The satirical punchline is this: employers are now scratching their heads and commissioning expensive employee listening programmes to understand why their workforce isn’t more emotionally invested... while simultaneously issuing AI-driven redundancy notices to several thousand of them before breakfast (Oracle’s 6am email economy). The employees are not the ones acting confused.
What the Data Actually Shows
The numbers on employee loyalty, taken at face value, look alarming. The 2024 WorkProud study found that only 23% of workers under 42 want to stay with their current employer long-term - a figure that drops to 18% for workers under 30. More striking still: only 16% of workers under 42 would stay loyal to their current employer if a competitor offered them more money to do the exact same job. Not a better role. Not a step up. Not more growth. Just more pay, same work, different company - and 84% would take it. For workers under 30, only 11% would stay.
Eleven per cent. If you run an employer brand and that number doesn't make you spit out your coffee, read it again. This is very opposite of loyalty.
And yet. The same body of research consistently finds that the vast majority of employees - around 82%, according to West Monroe Partners - still report feeling loyal to their employers. The Randstad Workmonitor 2025, which surveyed more than 26,000 workers across 35 markets, found that people still want meaningful work, strong communities, and organisations that invest in their development. So, they haven't become nihilists and they haven't stopped caring about work.
Have something to say that you can't say on the record? It belongs in The Exit Interview.
The gap between "82% feel loyal" and "only 11% of under-30s would turn down more money elsewhere to do the same job" is not the contradiction it sounds like. It is a definition problem. Employees are loyal. They are intensely, actively, demonstrably loyal. The question that the engagement surveys are not asking is: loyal to what?
The answer is not you, Mr Employer.
The Three Places Loyalty Actually Went
When employees redirected their loyalty away from the institution, it doesn't evaporate. It goes somewhere else, somewhere specific. Three places, to be precise.
The first is craft.
Craft loyalty is commitment to professional excellence that transcends any single employer. It is the engineer who turns down a promotion because it would take her away from the work she’s genuinely good at. The strategist who won’t join an organisation whose brief would blunt his thinking. The designer who maintains a portfolio that has nothing to do with her day job, because the portfolio is the actual asset - the thing that survives the next restructure, the next acquisition, the next morning when the Teams notification arrives at 6am.
Petulant employers might call this disloyalty. I’d call it intelligence and loyalty to something else. The employee who invests more in their skills than in their tenure is making exactly the right bet given the evidence available to them. They have simply done the maths that their employer hoped they wouldn’t do.
The second is career.
Career loyalty is commitment to the long arc: the trajectory, the reputation, the professional identity that accumulates across multiple organisations. The LinkedIn profile outlasts the employer. The CV is the actual asset. The references from respected colleagues matter more than the years of service award.
A PwC Global Workforce survey found that 28% of employees were very or extremely likely to switch employers in the next twelve months. That is a lot of people treating their career as the unit of investment, not the job. It is also, if you think about it, exactly what financial advisers tell people to do with money: don’t concentrate your bets in a single asset. Diversify. Build something portable.
Employees are diversifying. The organisations currently baffled by this are the ones that assumed their employees’ career ambitions would always be best served by staying put.
The third is community.
Community loyalty is the most underestimated of the three, and in some ways the most powerful. It is commitment to the professional network - the peers, mentors, collaborators and references - that provides the support, opportunity and honest feedback that most organisations are structurally incapable of providing.
The Randstad data is illuminating here. Forty-four per cent of workers have quit a job because of a toxic workplace - driven primarily by the desire to be part of a genuine community rather than a performance of one. Forty-two per cent would leave if their employer failed to support their career ambitions. Work-life balance nudged past pay as the top motivator for the first time in 2025 - not because people stopped caring about money, but because the non-financial elements of the employment relationship have become the primary differentiator in a world where the financial ones are commoditised.
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People are building professional relationships that will outlast every employer they work for. The LinkedIn community, the professional association, the alumni network, the group chat of former colleagues from three jobs ago who still send each other opportunities - these are the loyalty structures that employees are investing in. And they are significantly more reliable than anything on the careers page.
The AI Acceleration
If the loyalty redirect was already underway, the AI and layoff wave of 2024 and 2025 didn’t cause it. It just made it impossible to ignore.
In 2025 alone, 245,953 tech workers were laid off across the industry, according to the TrueUp tracker. More than 55,000 of those cuts were directly attributed to AI, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas - the highest level of total layoffs since the 2020 pandemic. Amazon eliminated 14,000 corporate roles citing AI-enabled leaner structures. Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support positions with CEO Marc Benioff stating, with a cold wave of the hand that would make most HR directors weep, “I need less heads.”
And then there is Klarna.
Klarna replaced approximately 700 employees with AI and announced it publicly, presenting the decision as evidence of how advanced their technology had become. Within months, customer service quality had declined measurably, customer complaints had risen, and the company had quietly begun the process of rehiring humans. The whole cycle - replacement, deterioration, reversal - completed in under eighteen months.
What Klarna demonstrated, unintentionally, was the precise lesson that employees across every industry were already learning: employer commitment is conditional, reversible, and subject to revision whenever the technology calculus changes. If the employment relationship can be terminated and reinstated based on a quarterly productivity model, then employee loyalty - the deep, irrational, above-and-beyond kind that organisations actually want - cannot reasonably be expected in return.
Employees watched Klarna. They watched Amazon. They watched the 6am Oracle emails and the town halls where leaders explained that “this was the hardest decision we’ve ever made” while simultaneously reporting record quarterly profits. They saw it all.
The message coming from all these once coveted employers was clear... we said what we needed to say to attract you over. We’ll say what we need to say when you’re no longer needed. Our values don’t apply if they get in the way of extracting profits. And being successful and profitable is not a good enough reason to care for the people who got us there.
The Coasters Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Forrester Research has a name for the endpoint of this process, and it is considerably more worrying than “disengagement.”
They call them coasters. Employees who have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that their employer does not deserve their best effort - and who are delivering exactly what they are paid to deliver, and not a joule more. In 2024, this group represented 27% of the workforce. In 2025, 25%. The 2026 projection is 28%.
That is more than a quarter of every organisation’s workforce showing up, completing their tasks, collecting their salary, and directing their actual energy -their creative thinking, their discretionary effort, their genuine professional investment - somewhere else entirely. To their side projects. To their professional communities. To the career they’re building that will outlast this particular employer.
What makes this quiet quitting different from traditional disengagement is that it doesn’t show up cleanly in the data. Coasters are not the actively disengaged employees who drag down culture surveys and write Glassdoor reviews. They are the ones who score neutral on everything. Who are present, functional, and completely absent simultaneously. Who have done the calculation and concluded that bringing their whole selves to work is a bad investment, given current market conditions.
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Employer brands, almost by definition, are trying to attract the opposite: people who will give more than they’re paid for, who will become advocates, who will recruit their networks, who will stay even when a competitor makes a better offer for an identical role. The coaster population makes that pitch harder - not because they are openly negative, but because they are proof that the pitch that got them through the door didn’t deliver.
The Employer Branding Consequence
Here is what this means for anyone responsible for an employer brand.
You are no longer competing only with other employers for loyalty. You are competing with craft, with career, and with community - three entities that have, in many cases, demonstrated a better return on employee investment than you have. Your EVP is up against the portfolio, the alumni network, and the professional identity that your employee is building independent of you. And that identity, unlike your EVP, doesn’t get restructured every eighteen months when there’s a new CHRO.
The traditional employer brand response to falling loyalty figures is to invest in the attraction side: better careers pages, stronger social content, more authentic employee stories. None of which addresses the actual problem. Attraction without retention is an expensive treadmill. And retention, in a world of redirected loyalty, requires something fundamentally different from what most EVPs currently promise.
The Gallup data from 2024 is the canary: employee engagement in the US hit a ten-year low. Global engagement fell to 21%, costing the world economy $438 billion in lost productivity. Trust in immediate managers dropped from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024. Intent to leave among emerging leaders rose from 13% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. These would have been deeply alarming data points a few years ago. Now, it feels like some of these abysmal trends are by design.
And the employer brands currently responding to these challenges with a refreshed values framework and a new set of cringy LinkedIn posts are, with respect, missing the point by a considerable margin.
What Actually Earns Redirected Loyalty
I’ve said this a lot this year, but with good reason... the organisations that will earn back redirected loyalty are not the ones that build louder EVPs. They are the ones that align their proposition with where loyalty actually went.
That means craft development, not just compensation. The employees who have redirected their loyalty to their skills are looking for employers who will actively invest in those skills - not as a retention tool, not as a line item in the L&D budget that never materialises, but as a genuine commitment to their professional growth. The companies that will win talent in the next five years are the ones that can credibly say: you will be better at your job when you leave here than you were when you arrived. And mean it.
It means genuine community, not the performance of it. The Randstad finding that 44% of workers have left because of toxic workplaces is not a culture problem that can be solved by a values refresh. It is a relationship problem that can only be solved by relationships - real ones, between real people, built over time through shared work and genuine mutual investment. The employer brand that can demonstrate what its professional community actually looks like - the mentorship, the collaboration, the honest development conversations - will be significantly more credible than the one that shows a group of diverse employees laughing in a kitchen.
It means accepting the new shape of careers. The employee who joins, grows significantly, and leaves after three years having built a network, developed their craft, and contributed meaningfully to the organisation - this should not be decried as a retention failure, it is now a normal working employment relationship. Employer brands that can reframe their proposition around that reality - talent alumni, professional reputation, the kind of place that makes careers rather than just fills roles - will attract people whose loyalty is worth having, precisely because they have directed it accurately. Loyalty doesn’t have to be for decades. Three years of a high engagement and going the extra miles is worth way more than a team full of cruisers.
All the employers who refuse to wake up to this reality (that they created) can keep commissioning engagement surveys and wondering why the scores keep falling.
The Conclusion
Employees are still loyal. Deeply, durably, productively loyal.
They are loyal to the colleagues who have invested in them. To the professional communities that will advocate for them when they need it. To the craft they have built over years and intend to carry forward for decades. To the career trajectory they are navigating with considerably more strategic clarity than most organisations apply to their talent planning.
What they are no longer loyal to is the institution that told them they were family and then notified them of their redundancy through a calendar invite. The organisation that launched a wellbeing programme in the same year it eliminated its graduate scheme. The employer brand that promised growth and delivered a pay freeze and a return-to-office mandate in the same announcement.
Employers spent a decade asking employees to bring their whole selves to work. Their whole selves came equipped with functioning judgement, a LinkedIn profile, and a very accurate memory.
The loyalty was always there. You just had to deserve it.
Takeaways
Loyalty didn't disappear - it was rationally redirected
Employees didn't become disloyal. They watched organisations treat the employment relationship as a cost to be optimised, updated their mental models accordingly, and directed their commitment somewhere more reliable - their craft, their career, their professional community. This is not a generational character flaw. It is basic cause and effect.
The data gap tells the real story
82% of employees still report feeling loyal. Only 11% of workers under 30 would turn down more money elsewhere to stay in the same job. Both numbers are true simultaneously - because employees are loyal to something, just not to their employer. Until organisations understand what loyalty actually got redirected toward, no EVP refresh will fix the retention problem.
A pay rise from a competitor is all it takes - and that should alarm you
Not a promotion. Not a more interesting role. Just more money, same work, different employer - and 84% of workers under 42 would take it. When loyalty is that thin, the employment relationship has become purely transactional. Organisations helped create that transaction. They now have to work much harder to move beyond it.
Coasters are not disengaged - they're accurately engaged
More than a quarter of the workforce has quietly decided their employer doesn't deserve their best effort and is delivering exactly what they're paid for - no more. They won't show up badly in your culture survey. They'll score neutral on everything. But their creative energy, discretionary effort, and genuine professional investment are going somewhere else. Your employer brand is trying to attract the opposite of this. The coaster population is evidence it isn't working.
You're not just competing with other employers for loyalty
Your EVP is up against the professional portfolio, the alumni network, and the independent career identity your employees are building regardless of where they work. These alternatives have a significant advantage: they don't get restructured every eighteen months, they don't send redundancy emails at 6am, and they have a consistent track record of delivering on what they promise.
The organisations that will win are the ones that align with where loyalty went
Stop competing against craft, career and community - start offering them. The employer brands that will earn back genuine commitment are the ones that can credibly say: you will be better at your job when you leave here than when you arrived. That means real skill development, real professional community, and accepting that a three-year employee who leaves having grown significantly is a success, not a failure.
