3 Strategies to Address #quietquitting ASAP
It’s the morning after a long night of work and you’re finally able to sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee. You open up your laptop to start catching up on some industry news when you see the #QuietQuitting hashtag trending on the socials. You click it, only to be inundated with stories of people who are just done with exceeding expectations, done doing work that they weren't hired for, and done going above and beyond. They're DONE! In this article, we’ll discuss what quiet quitting means (there's some variety and nuance around this), why leaders should care, and what we need to do to effectively lead through this "trend".
What is Quiet Quitting?
There are a few ways this trending term is being defined as:
1. Employees doing the bare minimum of their job expectations.
2. People refusing to work overtime or do work that is not within their job description.
3. Not subscribing to hustle culture and being defined by your productive output.
Interestingly, in the 2000's (am I dating myself yet?), we simply called this disengagement, low employee engagement, or low employee satisfaction. These were typically correlated to things like senior leadership, your direct supervisor, company culture, communication processes, technology and more.
In its new context, quiet quitting has emerged from post-pandemic factors including remote work impacts like increased working hours and decreased social connections, return to work policies that triggered The Great Resignation, a looming recession, and layoffs that transferred new seemingly unending work to employees, work that wasn't part of their job contacts.
Why do we Care?
Employee engagement has become a top business priority for senior executives. In this rapid cycle economy, business leaders know that having a high-performing workforce is essential for growth and survival. They recognize that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets.
Well that sounds super-corporatey 🤓 - but in less corporate speak, what we can say is: that highly engaged employees tend to be part of high-functioning teams, and high-functioning teams tend to perform in the following ways:
• assist and help team members out (outside of their own job descriptions) as a means by which to contribute to the well-communicated and common goal
• create and innovate to support the organization's objectives, and this may or. may happen within our outside of regular working hours
• reduce overall turnover and increase retention or employer loyalty
So QED: Low employee engagement = quiet quitting = low business performance = layoffs = you get the point.
We need to address the root causes of low engagement and quiet quitting so that we can mitigate the risks above.
3 EASY Steps to Address #QuietQuitting
Here are 3 quick strategies for leaders to target quiet quitting.
#1. Create Psychological Safety to ensure that you can actually find out IF you even have a problem or WHAT to do about it (HERE is a quick and free psychological safety assessment you can use). Identify which dimension(s) might need addressing and address them BEFORE you begin to solicit feedback and information from your team members. They won't be forthcoming unless they feel safe to share without repurcussion.
#2. Get data. Determine if quiet quitting is actually even happening and what the sources are. What tells you so? What data do you have? Survey or dare I say it; TALK to your employees and teams during 1:1’s and team meetings to assess employee engagement and satisfaction. Use data, not assumptions to drive your decision-making.
Assess the leadership style and culture of the organization. How are people rewarded or punished for behaviour? What is valued by the organization? What is criticized by the organization? I love to use leadership psychometric assessments like the Reach ECOSYSTEM or the MBTI Team Profiles to help understand the leadership style and culture of the organization that has some qualitative and quantitative data points to refer to.
#3. ACT ON DATA. Notice the all-caps? I’m not apologizing for yelling - I’m YELLING you (see what I did there?) to ACT ON THE FEEDBACK AND DATA THAT YOU RECEIVE. That means not getting defensive, not coming up with solutions, and not just trying to offer a pizza lunch (stop with the pizza already). It means recognizing that there is a problem and it means coming up with employee-centric approaches for the solutions.
TLDR? Get data and act, but no pizza, please.
