Quiet Quitting: A Manager's Dilemma
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Quiet Quitting. Interesting buzz words. Is it really anything new or unique? Rather than assume it’s about employees disengaging, Management Professor Peter Cappelli described it in sensible terms in his article, "Quiet quitting: Why it is exactly what should be happening today" for HR Executive.
Seeking a better balance between work and life demands, employees pushed back on calls to perform extra work. Post-pandemic, it’s gotten interpreted as a slacking of effort that is more focused on employees working from home.
Remember 2020 when everyone, executives, managers and employees, went home to work, yet managed, adjusted, and got work accomplished? During that time, we were struggling with our revisions for The Big Book of HR, 10th Anniversary Edition. So much was changing and the only thing we were certain of was that the workplace of the future would change. We got that right.
Now, the new normal is emerging as organizations and their employees figure out how to work—in office, remote, or a hybrid version of both. Organizations and employees are regrouping after having had time to reflect. Executives want employees back at work, perhaps because they don’t know how to measure productivity in this new environment.
REPORT: Orchestrated Collaboration: How Employee Engagement Enables Innovation in a Hybrid Workforce
Performance Management
Remember the hand-wringing over annual performance appraisals in 2020? A colleague posted on LinkedIn to “Leave these poor people alone. They have suffered enough for one year.” Cappelli reminds us that pre-pandemic we were in the middle of rethinking how to manage performance, but that work never got completed. The thinking was to move away from those traditional, annual performance reviews and ratings to a model of more frequent feedback.
What’s happened since then, and why hasn’t the work on revising performance management been completed? Cappelli suggests the role of supervisors was squeezed down—no time, no training—and more tasks were added to their workload, preventing them from monitoring, engaging, and managing carefully. Admittedly, supervisors who are closest to the workers must expend more effort to manage people who are physically distant.
Cappelli argues that going forward, we have to get better at managing performance—engaging and supporting employees and holding them accountable. It comes back to the supervisors who are employees too. They deserve attention, training, and resources to do their jobs—to manage those employees entrusted to them as part of their team whether those employees work in close proximity or remotely.
Technology and Tools
The pandemic taught us that high-tech was critical, but so was high touch.
What tools are needed in today’s changed workplace to help both managers and employees manage performance? In distributed and hybrid workforces, it’s important to assess the necessary changes to processes and resources. Consider:
- What processes have to change or be adjusted?
- How will employees connect?
- What additional resources, if any, are needed?
- How will employees be advised on changes and brought up to speed?
Recognize that many employees are now working in an asynchronous work model—on their own time with the flexibility to complete their work and answer colleagues in a convenient and reasonable time frame. Everything is not happening at the same time.
For this model to be successful, there are tools and apps, including messaging, video communication, whiteboarding, taskmaster, and shared documents on the cloud. Communicate which tools should be used when, and how they should be used. In other words, train everyone.
READ: Hybrid Work: Getting Leaders to Stay Connected with Teams
Proper use of technology will allow managers to oversee the workflow and the status of the overall project. They can quickly respond to issues and provide feedback.
That is precisely where regular check-ins and over-communicating plans and expectations in a new era of performance management happens. The focus should be on output, results, and meeting goals—the pre-pandemic conversations that were taking place when we were rethinking how to manage performance. Now, we have more tools to do so—tools that will keep employees and supervisors engaged and productive without demands to perform extra work that often leads to this so-called quiet quitting.
The Employee Experience
When you look below the clever title of Quiet Quitting and actually ask employees what’s missing at work and why they are reluctant to do more, they share that they aren’t:
- receiving recognition for the work they do;
- being informed of organizational goals or objectives
- being included
- being valued
That last point above says it all. If someone doesn’t feel they are being valued at work, why would they want to do anything extra? If you go deeper, why would they want to work for that organization at all?
READ: Emotional Compensation: An Employee Engagement and Retention Tool
There is a strong connection between people having a positive experience at work and wanting to contribute. Here are some actions for managers to consider:
- Re-recruit. Never lose sight of the reasons why you selected employees in the first place and continually remind them of why you hired them. Ask them if their expectations are being met and if not, find a way to make that happen.
- Engage. Continually reinforce your mission and live your values. Respect your employees and encourage them to be successful. Clearly communicate performance expectations and hold staff members accountable.
- Develop. Provide opportunities to build and maximize their skills. Encourage employees to take on new challenges and stretch assignments, so they grow and develop. Provide mentoring opportunities.
- Retain. Create an atmosphere of trust and accountability. Provide the tools they need to do their jobs. Be friendly and approachable. Be open to innovative ideas, and let employees know you value them and their ideas.
Feeling valued is critical to having an engaged workforce. More than being paid fairly and receiving a competitive benefits package, feeling valued means knowing that their work matters. It’s being transparent and sharing bad news when necessary. It’s saying thank you.
Josh Bersin says it this way, “Celebrate employee’s contributions and encourage them to thrive.” If you take his advice, provide your managers with the tools and encouragement to do so, quiet quitting shouldn’t be a big concern.
Photo by Marcus Aurelius for Pexels
