While working with organizations, I have experienced how good, reliable workers can become jaded by actions that the leadership takes.
Often times it happens that organizations -if they are doing things right- go through spectacular spurts of growth. In those periods, resources become scarce and overwhelmed by the inflow of work. These periods of growth also require sometimes establishing new procedures or migrating systems that could handle the new workload.
Leadership eventually learns about it and they draw up a plan to solve these shortcomings, and those plans sometimes include the creation of new departments or just hiring more people. The company makes an investment, and by putting in place new resources, things return to normality. But what happens to the people who have been holding the front all along? The new hires never experienced the issues, they were the ones augmenting the workforce.
When leadership forgets about those who have gone the extra mile and allowed the company to survive, they miss a great opportunity to show everybody that those are the types of employees that they would like to have.
So when reinforcements come in, it always pays to reward those who didn’t have it.