Let’s Stop Talking About Quiet Quitting
The term “quiet quitting” has been in the news a lot lately. Coined in 2009 at a Texas A&M economics symposium, quiet quitting is a terrible moniker for a perfectly normal thing—doing exactly what a job requires. The term has nothing to do with quitting or slacking off. It has everything to do with meeting the expectations of a job as outlined in a job description and not going “above and beyond” in an effort to guard against burnout and protect one’s mental health.
Why is “quiet quitting” a problem? Because leaders and managers frequently fall into the trap of believing that it should be the norm to go above and beyond in the workplace—that we can all consistently give 110 percent to our work. This is a fallacy. As humans, we are pulled in myriad directions by family, work, relationships, and community. On a good day we can divide ourselves between these competing forces, but in the long run, if I apply more energy in one area, then something else has to give. Yes, we can engage in superhuman bursts of activity, but for most of us mere mortals, these moments are more rare than they are common.
The stress of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has placed heightened emphasis on the balancing act that all working adults play between work, home, and self. More workplace participants are questioning their relationship with work and are aligning personal purpose with that of their employer. The days of working in a dead-end job or for a company whose purpose does not align with your own are waning. Many are questioning the payoff of continuously going the extra mile at work at the expense of our private lives. We are in the midst of a “Great Reset,” or a “Great Realignment.”
Labels Matter
The name “quiet quitting” is problematic because the phrase implies that something nefarious is going on—namely that an individual has checked out and is dead weight to a company or team. The phase is unnecessarily sensational and leads many to jump to the conclusion that quiet quitters are detrimental to company performance and team morale. In my opinion, we need to quickly relegate this phrase to the historical annals of corporate and popular vernacular.
Instead of placing unhelpful, sensational labels on a large subset of the workforce, let’s focus on the real problem (and opportunity)—the actively disengaged and the unengaged. According to Gallup’s most recent engagement survey, 32 percent of the U.S. workforce is “engaged” in their work, while 18 percent are actively disengaged. At the beginning of the pandemic, these numbers were 36 percent and 14 percent respectively. That leaves 50 percent of the workforce that exist along the spectrum of the “unengaged,” or what I like to call the “movable middle.”
To be clear with our definitions, the engaged are those employees who are enthusiastically dedicated to their work. Many large and mid-sized companies around the world measure this “enthusiastic dedication” annually by asking a series of questions in what are called engagement surveys. You’ve likely taken an engagement survey by answering questions that touch on the clarity of work expectations, frequency of recognition, supervisor empathy, and quality of work feedback.
In contrast, the actively disengaged are the folks in your organization who have “checked out” and may be purposefully working against the aims of the business. In my book, Balancing Act, I dedicate a number of pages to the dangers the actively disengaged pose to a business. Adjectives that describe these workers are words like “toxic” or “cancerous.” The actively disengaged are culture killers.
Finally, the unengaged (or moveable middle) are those who are doing their jobs but are neither fully engaged nor actively disengaged.
Many individuals who populate the moveable middle do wonderful work and contribute meaningfully to company objectives and society as a whole. They’re just not enthusiastically dedicated to their work and typically something else is more important to them such as family, philanthropy, or outside hobbies. Maybe their personal purpose doesn’t fully align with that of their employer, but not at the level that would drive a job change. Maybe they’ve decided to “work-to-live” instead of getting on the hamster wheel of “live-to-work.” These choices are deeply personal and we should not be vilifying the members of the moveable middle with a toxic label.
Should we be calling 50 percent of the workforce “quiet quitters?” I think not. Is quiet quitting directly related to the pandemic? Possibly, but the data suggests that the engaged subset of the employee population has fallen and the actively disengaged subset has increased by an equal proportion. The moveable middle has been reasonably stable through time.
Hence, it looks to me like the issue is twofold and that focusing solely on quiet quitting is problematic. Instead, the data highlights two themes: (a) the loss of four percentage points from the engaged category to the moveable middle—what is being termed quiet quitting—and (b) a four percentage point increase in active disengagement. I argue that the latter is more dangerous and potentially costly to organizations.
Engage the Moveable Middle and Exit the Actively Disengaged
If you’re a leader who’s concerned about “quiet quitting,” you don’t need to dream up newfangled approaches to solve the problem in your organization. Instead, I’d focus on engaging the moveable middle and exiting the actively disengaged from your business.
If we speak the truth of the undertones that surround the hubbub of “quiet quitting,” leaders are in search of tapping into the discretionary effort that their teams and individual contributors have available to give to the business. Employees who are more connected to the purpose and vision of the organization and who feel respected and valued are more likely to expend discretionary effort for the benefit of the company.
In my forthcoming book, The Balanced Business, I talk specifically about the balancing act organizational leaders play between building trust within/between teams and accountability for executing on business goals. Smooth handoffs and well-defined roles/responsibilities (flow) enable accountability and help foster trust. As a result, here are a specific set of recommendations to engage more of the moveable middle, reduce active disengagement, and increase available discretionary effort in your organization.
Focus on establishing and maintaining strategic clarity. Does everyone know where the organization is heading? Invest effort into creating and/or refining your business’s strategy statements. Strategy statements include purpose, vision, values, behaviors, and the “it” (what you do and how you differentiate). Individuals who can connect the dots between their personal purpose and that of the organization are more likely to expend discretionary effort. It’s tough to connect the dots when a coherent strategy is nowhere to be found.
Invest in creating operational clarity. Are company goals sound, logical, aligned, and cascaded throughout the organization? Is the operational rhythm of the business obvious? Invest in building commercial acumen within your teams by clearly illustrating how your products and services get from idea to delivery. In other words, help everyone understand how your business’s various value streams function.
Create a compelling learning and development strategy and invest heavily in it. Some pundits who are weighing in on quiet quitting blame the reduction in engagement on bad managers. Indeed, the correlation between engagement and management quality is very high, providing strong rationale for investing in both technical and human skill development within all levels of your management ranks. Good managers yield strong engagement.
Convert job descriptions into standard work documents. Most job descriptions are terrible tools to rely on as a descriptor of the actual work that is done on a daily basis. Job descriptions are littered with compliance language and are difficult to read at best. In contrast, standard work is a living document that defines the who, what, and how of an individual or team’s work and is continually monitored and updated to incorporate new ways of working and incremental improvements to workflows.
Foster organizational flow. Nothing frustrates individuals and teams more than unreliable handoffs of work product along the value stream. Hence, it’s important to adopt the basic principles of continuous improvement and clearly identify roles and responsibilities up, down, and across the organization. Not only will individual contributors have a heightened understanding of their own job role (via the definition of their standard work), they will also see how the puzzle pieces fit together and will be more willing and able to assist others along the value stream. Put simply, how can a manager or leader expect an individual to go above and beyond (expend discretionary effort) if they can’t see how their work product adds value to the company’s finished goods and services? Worse yet, who on earth wants to expend discretionary effort if the value they add is hindered or destroyed by sloppiness, blockers, and poor organizational flow downstream?
Stop imagining that the norm should be to go above and beyond. Making the unengaged (the moveable middle) feel bad about meeting the expectations of their job is a surefire way to keep them unengaged. Make job expectations clear and make it okay for someone to do just enough to meet them. If it’s important to “raise the bar” to extract more effort from an individual or team, then be clear about it. Don’t make the height of the bar a big mystery in the hopes that team members will continually try to outdo themselves to please the boss.
Move the actively disengaged out of the organization. This is probably the most important recommendation I have to offer you today. Remember that “you are what you allow.” If the moveable middle sees that you put up with the antics of a genius jerk who makes everyone’s life miserable, how can you expect them to expend discretionary energy? The emotional waste of putting up with an anchor dragger or someone who’s actively working at cross-purposes to the team or organization is too high a cost for most people to bear. The pandemic has put the issue of emotional waste into sharper focus for many workplace participants. They’re either going to leave (Great Reset) or fade into the moveable middle.
Establish effective visual management tools and get incentive structures right. What do good outcomes look like? Does everyone know the metrics that matter to management? Are incentives aligned with goals and corporate strategy? Building team morale and trust is damn near impossible when a business operates in the mud of obfuscation and monetary incentives are misaligned.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that “quiet quitting” is just a sensational, flavor-of-the-day term for pundits to get clicks and rile everyone up. Let’s put this term in the rear view mirror and get back to the real (and difficult) work of promoting organizational flow, building achievable/realistic accountability frameworks, and fostering trust between individuals and teams. An improvement in engagement and business results will follow.
