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“Here today, gone tomorrow” pretty much says it all. The loyalty most employees have felt towards their employer has taken a major hit. Why? Downsizing and outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions.

Today, many employees feel as if they’re on their own. Yes, they continue to work, but something is missing. The old loyalty is gone. This raises a new challenge for business leaders: How do you retain good employees when they see themselves as free agents, responsible for taking care of themselves and their careers, and willing to jump to your competitor if the offer is right.

Here are three practical ways to rebuild a sense of loyalty.

1.Set Goals, Not Rules
Employees are most excited when they feel they’re accomplishing something meaningful at work. That’s why goals are more important than rules - they focus employees on what they should be doing; rules tell them what they should avoid doing. Take the example of Continental Airlines.

When Gordon Bethune became president, the airline was despised by just about everyone - travelers, stockholders, and not surprisingly, employees. In From Worst to First (John Wiley & Sons, 1998), the insightful CEO tells what he did to turn the company around: He stopped cutting costs everywhere and got everybody excited about a new major company goal. Industry research showed that the most important thing airline passengers want is to get to their destination on time. This became Continental’s number-one goal and rallying point.

Everyone, from the pilot to the caterer, was empowered to do whatever he or she could to make it happen. If necessary, they could even decide to forget the employee manual. They were challenged to make one thing happen - get the planes taking off and landing on time.

Within one year, Continental went from last place among the top 10 airlines to seventh. The following year they hit number one! That one goal, and the empowerment to meet it, turned a demoralized workforce into one of the most loyal groups of employees around.

2.Share the Rewards
If your team accomplishes your goal(s), today’s employees expect (and deserve) to share in the rewards. If they reinvest their loyalty, the company needs to reinvest in them. New forms of pay can help rekindle loyalty, in effect becoming “golden handcuffs.” Smart companies are giving more bonuses to lower-level employees, selling shares of stock at discounted prices, and handing out slices of company profits.

These new forms of pay work both at large companies and small. For example, at Continental, each of the 40,000+ employees receives a share ($65) of the money saved (some $2.5 million) every month the airlines realizes its on-time goal. A small company I work with does something similar: When the company meets its profitability goals for the year, everyone shares equally in the financial rewards. Why shouldn’t they? After all, they are the ones who have made the company successful.

3.Encourage Job Flexibility
Loyalty will recover if you help your employees become better workers. Nothing remains the same in today’s topsy-turvy business world, including career goals (estimates are that the average adult today changes careers six to seven times in the course of his or her life). One reason is that when work become routine, we tend to lose interest and look elsewhere for new challenges.

Keeping people interested requires a proactive approach on the part of the managers. Today’s new breed of business leaders must know their people’s career desires and continually try to match them with the changing opportunities within the company.

AT&T, for example, has developed a pilot program to do just that. In Workforce 21, employees’ skills and aspirations are assessed. Then the employees are affiliated with like-minded colleagues. They form one of AT&T’s Knowledge Centers, available to work on any of the company’s varied projects. As business challenges arise, they are moved from one unit to another to utilize their core competencies and skills, in a just-in-time fashion. According to Anne Walk, vice president of human resources business management, this keeps workers interested, stimulated - and loyal.

Motorola has a variation that works well too. Its managers ask all employees six questions every quarter. One of them is: What prevents you from doing your job 100 percent? Managers must review their employees’ responses within two weeks and work to remove whatever has been identified as an obstacle to job satisfaction and career fulfillment.

Today, many firms are feeling the pinch of employee turnover and are scrambling to reverse the trend. These three proactive tactics will help you rebuild the employee loyalty your company needs for business success.