An Epidemic, a BuzzWord, or a Cop-Out?
I’ve been seeing the term Quiet Quitting more and more over the last few months. To be very clear, I’ve never been one to jump on many bandwagons. This catchphrase was definitely one that got me to scowl more than a few times! And in complete transparency, I just haven’t been willing to dig into the idea until finally reaching my boiling point with it just recently!
So what in the world is Quiet Quitting? An article I found on Forbes.com called Why Half The Workforce Is Quiet Quitting, And What To Do About It shared this definition:
Quiet quitting is actually a new term for an old concept: it describes employees who exist in that state between “actively engaged” and “actively disengaged.” Employees who are “actively disengaged” are dissatisfied with their workplace.
One comment leading up to that bothered me more than a little bit… The author stated that, “Unlike actual quitting, a manager wouldn’t necessarily know if an employee has “quietly quit,” which perhaps explains why the trend is so unnerving.” They nailed it when referring to it as a “phenomenon that has recently taken the workforce (and the internet) by storm” because it’s certainly receiving an ample share of airtime. But as stated in the definition I just shared, it really is just a new name for an old concept - a concept that’s gotten almost no attention whatsoever in all the years I’ve studied employee engagement!
Since I’ve never been all that good at keeping secrets (just ask Cindy how I proposed if you want an example), I’m letting the cat out of the bag right now! I’m absolutely 100% convinced that any individual or organization (notice I didn’t say leader) using Quiet Quitting as an excuse for poor productivity is just choosing the flavor of the month to be their current cop-out!
Now that I’ve pissed off a few readers, let me qualify that harsh statement - because I truly care about you and your results! Otherwise I wouldn’t put the time and energy that I do into putting resources like this together…
For the last 25 years, I’ve studied employee engagement as much as anyone I know; not just from an academic standpoint, but through practical application because every role I’ve held in that time has hinged on getting measurable results through teams of people with ZERO direct authority. In all that time, I’ve never seen a study that the part of the workforce we’re now hearing referred to as the quiet quitters at less than 50%. In our Recruitment, Retention, & Culture course, which we recently updated to include three more lessons, I cover several sources showing the actively engaged employees ranging from 20% to 30% of any given organization and the actively disengagement being within that same range. The one constant I’ve seen in every study I’ve ever read was that the group in the middle, the ones we’re now supposed to be frantically concerned about, always represents about half of any company.
Hear me when I say this: I’ve ALWAYS believed that group deserved very focused attention! That said, I’ve rarely seen them get it unless it was when they were being scolded in a group meeting for something the actively disengaged folks did but the manager wasn’t willing to address directly…
With all that in mind, this isn’t a new workforce epidemic but it should still garner more attention than most new buzzwords. As we move forward, we’ll take a fairly deep dive into why we should be paying attention to this (finally) and we’ll look at why it matters so much to every organization. But before that though, let’s take a hard look at the statement from that article that bothered me so much…
A Manager Wouldn’t Necessarily Know…?
We don’t need to hold a press conference, but it really is something we should have been keenly aware of for years! Now that I’ve made a case that quiet quitting hasn’t necessarily taken the place of Covid on the pandemic scene, and in some cases it may actually be the current cop-out for not accepting leadership responsibility, let’s circle back to the statement from the Forbes.com article I referenced before that ruffled my feathers… “Unlike actual quitting, a manager wouldn’t necessarily know if an employee has “quietly quit,” which perhaps explains why the trend is so unnerving.”
If the only way a manager can tell the difference between their actively engaged team members and the ones who are neither actively engaged or actively disengaged is when they stop showing up for work, then I believe it’s nothing short of remarkable if they have any actively engaged team members at all!
An article I found from “The Business Journals” called How to spot employees who are quiet-quitting risks — and what to do about it opened by saying that “Experts say there are several red flags that illustrate when a worker could be at risk of quiet quitting.” The article went on to list things a supervisor or manager could do once they recognize any of those “red flags.” I’ve hit on both the signs to watch for and how to address them in various lessons in our Leading At The Next Level program so I won’t take the time to do that again here…
I often jump on my soapbox to challenge the idea that managing and leading are synonymous. That quote from the Forbes article makes it so glaringly obvious! If a manager is so out of tune with any member of their team that they don’t recognize changes in their behavior that screams they’re quietly quitting, they’re paying far more attention to the process and not nearly enough attention to the people involved! A few years ago in a conversation with Carly Fiorina, she told us that “Managers produce results within existing constraints and conditions while leaders change or challenge existing constraints and conditions.” She went on to say that leaders do that by “empowering the people closest to the problem to take action.” The existing constraints and conditions lie in the process where changes involve empowering and leading people… And that empowerment requires knowing what’s going on with our team members at any given time!
When I paint a mental picture of employee engagement, I describe ten people rowing a boat. Two or three up front, rowing as hard as they can representing the actively engaged folks. Two or three others in the back, doing everything they possibly can to sink the boat to describe the actively disengaged ones. But always five in the middle just sitting there holding their oars in their lap; not actively engaged or actively disengaged… With that analogy in mind, would you have any trouble at all understanding who was in each group?
A manager will make plans for getting the boat to their destination based on who’s doing what in the boat… A leader, however, will take an active role in getting each team member to become involved in reaching that destination! A leader will have a clear picture of what each person is capable of and whether or not they’re performing to their potential. A leader knows each individual on their team well enough to recognize even the slightest change and works to understand why that change occurred before they’ve quietly quit…
We’ll circle back to how a leader addresses these changes soon enough. Before that though, let’s take a look at why this is so important and a few of the causes…
If They’re Not Rowing At All, Rowing Harder Isn’t Likely…
About a dozen years ago, I was offered a position with global responsibility for the behavior-based safety process within the company I worked for. The fellow who had been in the role for more than a decade was retiring and since I had supported him by working with most of our facilities across North America, I was the logical choice to become his successor. The challenge was that I had been doing that based solely on my experience and the results we had achieved at my home facility where the guy who was retiring had been through an official training/certification process with the company we contracted with for the technology we were using. One of the requests I had in the interview process was that if I accepted the position, I would have the opportunity to go through that formal training process so I could be even more effective in the role - and so some of the executives I’d be dealing with would take me a bit more seriously. After all, some corporate environments seem far more concerned about the letters that follow our names than they are with actually achieving results…
My request for that specific training was denied, citing the cost involved and the potential for me to take a higher paying position outside the company once I had the credential. I thought both reasons were stupid! I immediately asked the gentlemen I would have reported to had I accepted the position if he knew what was worse than training someone, then having them leave. He didn’t, so I enlightened him… I explained that the only thing worse than that was not training them and having them stay - then you’re stuck with someone who isn’t good enough to go somewhere else! The seconds that followed were a bit tense but he and I had worked fairly well together for several years so he got over it soon enough.
Now let’s tie that back to the quiet quitting idea we’ve been looking at to this point… As I dug through various articles to get my head around why this has become such a hot topic, I found one on the Harvard Business Review called When Quiet Quitting Is Worse Than the Real Thing that mentioned one of the things that concerned managers the most was the folks who weren’t actively engaged were less willing to go the extra mile, stating that “their unwillingness to go the extra mile often increases the burden on their colleagues to take on extra work instead.”
Think back to that row boat analogy I referenced before… I’ve NEVER seen an employee engagement study of any kind that’s suggested less than 50% of any organization didn’t fall in the middle category of neither actively engaged nor actively disengaged - the ones sitting in the middle of the boat who were just holding their oars… This is not a new thing! And these are now the same folks who are being referred to as the quiet quitters; if they’re oars aren’t in the water currently, I’m guessing they’re not the ones who are signing up for extra rowing…
Don’t misunderstand my point here, I’m not even beginning to suggest that this is acceptable - and I never have. I’m just saying this has been an issue for years and it now seems like everyone’s blaming it for all their shortcomings…
The reality is that 20-30% of any company who are actively engaged (the highest I’ve ever seen for any company is just over 30%) are generally the ones that drive productivity. After all, they are the ones rowing the boat! Another HBR article I found a while back describing the results these folks produce by sharing that “Increased commitment can lead to a 57% improvement in discretionary effort—that is, employees’ willingness to exceed duty’s call. That greater effort produces, on average, a 20% individual performance improvement and an 87% reduction in the desire to pull up stakes.”
With that significant increase in discretionary effort and individual performance, I can certainly see why executives would want the 50% in the middle of the boat to engage but I’m guessing that throwing around a new buzzword won’t be quite enough to make it so! And since guilting them into sticking those oars in the water won’t likely make it happen, I believe it would serve us all well to know exactly who holds responsibility for initiating the changes we want to see - and that’s where we’ll pick up next time!