It's bad enough that our employers expect us to show up for work five days a week. It's even worse that they actually expect us to work while we're at work, or, at least, stay awake from 9 to 5. But recently, it became clear to me that our managers want something more than reliability and productivity. They also want loyalty.

You heard me right -- to succeed today, you not only have to pretend to like your job and act like you respect your co-workers. You also may actually have to do it.

Or so I learned from "Why Loyalty Matters" by Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy. According to the authors, who conducted a survey on the subject, a loyal employee is a happy employee. I suppose this makes a certain amount of crazy sense. There are sick individuals who enjoy being abused and debased. They're called the human resources department.

For everyone else, the loyalty impulse may be a little harder to trigger. Keiningham and Aksoy suggest that "only about 30 percent of us feel loyal to our employers, or feel that our employers have earned our loyalty." By their own calculation, that leaves 70 percent of us who are disloyal and unhappy. The figure seems low, but I'll take it.

If you have nothing better to do and want to improve your loyalty quotient, allow me to share some tips from the loyalty-meisters on five attributes of loyalty. And if you feel any loyalty at all to me, you'll put off turning to the comics and read every last one.

1. Support/assistance:

The authors ask, "Do you offer to help co-workers in the form of technical help, brainstorming, expertise and sharing contacts?"

In other words, are you a complete sucker? It's fine to offer co-workers the benefit of your superior technical expertise, like teaching fellow staff members the time-saving technique of making an instant breakfast by putting an Eggo waffle in their CD drive and pouring maple syrup on the keyboard. And certainly you can offer to share contacts, but keep it on a business level. It's OK to give away the contact information for your best customers, but you're the only one who should have the phone number of the boss's dominatrix.

2. Giving time/attention:

When dealing with coworkers, do you "show empathy, and demonstrate that you understand their issues, and really 'get' their point of view?" This isn't easy, since most of your fellow workers are foolish flibbertigibbets who have no issues worth getting, or even listening to. This is why you need to conduct all your workplace relationships on Twitter, so you can randomly tweet your co-workers, "R U upset abt ur big pay cut?" or "JSYK the boss is considering firing u." If that's not empathy, I don't know what is. Continued...