Question of the Week: Quiet Quitting

Recently, I launched a new blog series, Question of the Week. It is focused on helping leaders react to current events that are shaping the world of work and likely affecting their team's performance. To do this, I'm providing a weekly question or prompt that leaders can ask their teams.

Last week, Facebook and Twitter announced massive layoffs. This adds to the news of hiring freezes by some of the biggest brands in the world. And while it's easy to believe that layoffs may be problems that "other companies" experience, it's important to understand how this overall narrative impacts the productivity of our own teams.

The latest buzz phrase making its way around social media and business blogs is "quiet quitting," which references individuals who meet the minimum requirements of their job but nothing more. According to Gallup, "They are psychologically unattached to their work and company and they put time but not energy and passion into their work."

While quiet quitting is a new buzz phrase, it's referencing a timeless challenge of employee disengagement. And unfortunately, events like big tech layoffs only reinforce mindsets that cause people to give the bare minimum. Let's quickly unpack this and consider a question that might reveal this on our teams...

First, the punchline: quiet quitting is complicated but often, there are root cause issues that leaders control. If you are humble enough to seek knowledge with your employees, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you exactly why they’re disengaging.

Let’s jump back to the layoff news. When highly visible company meltdowns occur, it just reinforces that employers can’t be trusted. Another layer to this narrative is that companies are starting to admit that some inflation has occurred because they were given a permission slip by the market to charge higher prices … not because they legitimately experienced supply chain challenges or higher prime cost to run their businesses. Again, this reinforces the belief that leaders are only driven by the profit-motive.

Then, there’s the notion of “quiet firing.” This is when leaders ignore the best practices of providing feedback, coaching, accountability, and clarity of priorities. These leaders view disengagement as employee laziness versus seeing it for what it mostly is, exhaustion and burnout. So, when you put market messages of untrustworthy employers together with past experiences of bad bosses, it creates a toxic cocktail that causes employees to check out and try less.

But you’re a good leader, or at least aspiring to be more intentional. That’s why you read this weekly blog! You have the ability to counter all of this noise with a curious mind and a humble heart. Ask your team members, “What’s the ONE reason you’ll leave our team in the next six months?” The fact that you cared enough to ask might combat quiet quitting all by itself.

I can’t emphasize enough that this should be viewed as a team problem and not just an individual engagement issue. Healthy, cohesive teams make commitments that matter and hold each other accountable to those commitments whether the boss is in the room or not. When a team has a quiet quitter, commitments and accountability dramatically decline. This erodes productivity and output for everyone.

Final thought: last week I wrote about net promoter score and creating a strong action-plan for the ONE thing you could do as a leader to make the work experience better for your employees. If you follow that approach on a quarterly basis, and you ask a more timely question like this week’s prompt, you will most certainly see themes emerging.

The key here is consistency and focus. Don’t try to action-plan every single response you get. Rather, identify the TOP theme and take action on that ONE item. Then, rinse and repeat throughout the year. This will help your employees overcome trust issues that were reinforced by bad bosses of the past and ugly current events that are dominating the news.

If you’re lacking a tool to execute this process and ask an open-ended question with your team, try POPin. There’s a 14-day free trial that will help you host an honest conversation in a psychologically safe and trusted way.

See you next week!

Chris Laping is the best-selling author of People Before Things. He is also the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of People Before Things, LLC., a boutique consultancy that helps leaders galvanize people for change.