What is Quiet Quitting?
Quiet Quitting is a term used to describe workers who intentionally decide they will no longer do work they feel is above and beyond what they are getting paid to do. Workers feel emboldened to post these feelings on social media especially on TikTok. They could be disengaged at in person meetings and via Zoom. Or just have unexplained absences.
Quiet quitters haven’t quit their jobs… they’ve just quit overachieving. They’ve stopped volunteering for office committees that go beyond their job description. They’ve trained their phones to silence Slack notifications after 5 p.m. They’ve made doing the bare minimum cool.
Gallup recently did a survey about quiet quitting, counting workers who report being neither engaged nor “actively disengaged” at work. They found that these quiet quitters make up at least 50% of the U.S. workforce.
Gallup finds a decline in engagement and employer satisfaction among remote Gen Z and younger millennials — those below age 35.
This is a significant change from pre-pandemic years. Since the pandemic, younger workers have declined significantly in feeling cared about and having opportunities to develop — primarily from their manager.
What can you do about this?
Prevent burnout and keep morale high while keeping employees engaged. It is much harder for a manager to check in on remote workers and make sure they are doing ok. Companies need to be training managers to ensure they know how to illustrate that their direct reports are valued, cared for and understood.
Managers need to create accountability for individual performance, team collaboration and customer value — and employees must see how their work contributes to the organization’s larger purpose.
It is easy to easy to ignore some of your top performers. As the old adage says, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Those employees who keep their heads down and just focus on performance may be getting 30 LinkedIn posts a day offering them more money, a better job, better benefits.
“Quiet quitting is a mental health crisis; it’s a leadership and engagement phenomenon supported by social media; if you are disconnected from the mission of your company and you are feeling distracted, there is support on social media to only do the letter of your job.”-Mark DiMassimo, the Founder and Creative Chief of DiMassimo Goldstein
If companies don’t set boundaries between personal and business time, employees feel that their mental health and family lives are at risk. The company that just focuses on getting results instead keeping employees healthy to do a good job will be penalized by quiet quitting.
The stakes are high, with some estimates putting the cost of a single disengaged employee at 34% of their salary — meaning a disengaged employee earning $50,000 could cost their employer $17,000
The number one behavior that helped was trust. When direct reports trusted their leader, they also assumed that the manager cared about them and was concerned about their well-being. Positive relationships with all of your direct reports and consistency in messaging will go a long way in fostering strong employee-manager relationships.
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