Growing up, the thought of what your career journey would look like seemed simple. After university, you would gain a career in something you studied. This would lead to working eight-hour days and 40 hours a week, and work-life balance appeared almost second nature. However, a growing movement has foiled that picturesque image of today’s workforce. It is the ever-growing movement of working-to-rule or Quiet Quitting.
Quiet Quitting is a growing trend, particularly in North America, to work within restricted hours and duties. Proponents of Quiet Quitting often do not go beyond their job description, take on extra work, or work beyond their hours. This trend is frequently highlighted on TikTok and seeing prominence in younger generations entering the workforce.
Why are Employees Quiet Quitting?
Over half of the United States workforce is said to have been Quiet Quitting more often than not during the COVID-19 pandemic. This movement was thought to have stemmed from work-from-home orders that made employees question the importance of traditional office practices. Why did employees have to go back into an office full-time when many proved they could do their work and increase their productivity remotely?
The pandemic made many professionals question what they were getting out of their work. This led to more employees taking a step back from their usual work ethic and taking more time for themselves to help improve their work-life balance. Quiet Quitting might have largely gone unnoticed as a movement if it wasn’t for the massive discussions about it on social media in 2022. Since Quiet Quitting does not involve actually quitting your job, it can be inconspicuous to bosses and managers.
Managers and bosses find Quiet Quitting alarming as they are dealing with more disengaged employees who have one foot out the door. Quiet quitting often goes hand in hand with the Great Resignation and is leading to greater attrition rates. Nonetheless, this movement does not have to hurt your company’s productivity. Instead, it can be a catalyst for change within your organization.
Investigate Why Your Employees are Quiet Quitting
Several slumps in your employee’s performance or a general sense of disengagement can usually be a sufficient reason to investigate Quiet Quitting. If you find your employees are not going above and beyond, and instead are working to rule more, it’s time to explore why this is happening.
You need committed employees who are passionate about what they do and see a future with your company. Job vacancies are at an all-time high and employees are looking for better work opportunities, salaries, and work-life balance in other careers. Using Quiet Quitting to investigate how satisfied or dissatisfied your employees are is needed to keep and acquire great talent.
Here’s what you can do to investigate:
- Survey your employees to collect anonymous feedback
- Review your organizational values and see if employees are on the same page
- Review your performance management system and see what common trends emerge
After this is done, it’s time to develop strategies that will optimize your culture and team’s performance.
Optimize Culture Before Performance
It’s common for organizations to want to optimize performance over culture. Managers need to see optimal results if they are to rise their department’s status or make a profit. However, this practice of improving performance over culture needs to be flipped around. Culture is the indicator of how high an organization performs.
Gallup researched 112,312 business and work units around the world. They wanted to find the relationship between a company that valued a balanced work culture and overall engagement. What Gallup found was companies that scored high in their work culture saw twice the level of success than the organizations that did not. In a sense, employees who feel like their jobs are empathetic to their needs as people feel more committed and less burnt out.
Ways to Eliminate Quiet Quitting
Quiet Quitting will not be eliminated by the stick but rather by the carrot. Overdisciplining your employees for not going above and beyond their job description will only fuel resentment and growing attrition rates. Focus on ways to create an engaging culture, so the employee feels valued at their job.
One of the employees’ biggest challenges is a growing gap between inflation and salaries. A good way to increase engagement is by looking at your compensation frameworks. This can help realign an employee’s interest within the company if they see a straightforward way to get ahead.
Another big piece of culture to look at is work-life balance. Can your employees work remotely or hybrid? Are they receiving enough personal time off, vacation, or mental health days? Employees that take time for themselves feel more alert and engaged with their jobs.
Above all, surveying your employee’s needs is an essential part of optimizing culture. Taking the time to understand the root of your employees acting disengaged is the first step.
Quitting the Old, Hiring the New
Phenomenons like Quiet Quit and The Great Resignation have led many organizations to seek out different approaches when it comes to their talent management strategy. Our founder, Jeremy Henderson, will be leading a webinar on how empathy plays a pivotal role in recruitment and retention in 2022. The virtual event is in partnership with the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies – Ontario (ACEC-Ontario) and will be held on November 10, 12 PM ET.
Register now to be part of a more empathetic way to hire and engage professionals.