Quiet hiring: a mosquito in workplace discussions

I committed to staying calm in 2023, but here I am nine days in, with another thing already getting on my every remaining nerve. The re-branding of age old concepts now called - quiet hiring. Really. This is all the emperor's new clothes, re-scripted for the workplace.

It is nothing more than a diversion. It's a mosquito in workplace discussions. On the one hand it's the dilution of employment conditions and experiences and the washing of workplace traumas. On the other, it's the re-purposing of totally normal practices which have been around forever.

It needs a good dose of Deet or a swat.

What is quiet hiring?

Quiet hiring refers to companies who re-skill or up-skill their workforce to fill vacant positions without bringing on new, full-time employees. This can come in various forms.

1. Hiring contractors instead of permanent employees.

Companies have always hired freelancers, consultants and contractors. It means that they have flexibility to let people go without financial exposure and helps keeps their employment overheads down. But agility = disposability for individuals. This has been going on since people started to sell their labour and talent for payment.

2. Up-skilling or re-skilling existing employees to meet the needs of the business.

Training has always been critical to organisational sustainability. Remember the Henry Ford line : “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave, is not training them, and having them stay”. Whether this was via formal training courses, internal and external, mentoring programmes, or stretch assignments, these are practices that have always been in place.

Training people on its own has never been enough. To quote Richard Branson:

Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to”

Companies still have to take care of their people.

3. Giving existing employees more work

In some geographies?this is also about “dumping on current staff with more work” as reported in Sky News Australia

“It’s quiet hiring, like ‘hey, you’re really good at what you do, so how about I give you three more jobs?’

Because that's clearly going to work!

Antidote to quiet quitting

What on earth is innovative about any of this? Like its counterpart "quiet quitting" which is new speak to cover the idea that employees are no longer willing to go the extra mile without adequate compensation. Layer on a refusal to sacrifice their physical and psychological health, as well as their work life balance.

Research from Gallup in 2021 confirms that Gen Z and Millennials look for organisations which care about their well being.?Projections indicate that these two cohorts will make up 67.6% of the global workforce by 2025. ?

If this is supposed to be the antidote to quiet quitting there may still be many lessons to be learned. Up-skilling employees may go some way to appease those who are feeling dissatisfied about their career trajectory. But quiet quitting is a rebellion against poor leadership and the notion that discretionary effort is a built into performance expectation, not a voluntary add.

Quiet hiring doesn't solve the problem of poor leadership.

The role of trust

I have written about the importance of trust before as the next leadership challenge. According to an HBR survey 58% of people would trust a stranger before they would trust their boss.? (The Evolved Executive: Heather Hanson Wickman)

“Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people.”? Stephen Covey

Managers must learn how to gain the trust of their teams, to foster well being. This means treating them as people not "human capital" which sounds remarkably like "human cattle." Managers have the ability to know their staff as unique individuals, including what is going on for them in their personal lives, as well as their goals, values and vision.?

Managers have to establish cultures of care with accountability to produce better results, foster collaborative team work, which will add value for customers. Above all, employees need to be recognised to feel valued and shown how their work contributes to the overall mission of the company.

It’s not enough to say to your team “trust me!” and they will immediately do that. Building trust means you have to role model specific behaviours that inspire trust, and to do that consciously and consistently.? Trust once broken can take years to repair if it can be restored at all.

An annoying distraction

This re-branding is little more than an annoying distraction from real workplace issues. Burnout rates are higher than ever before and employee engagement is at historic lows. Data shared by Gallup shows that?a third of all workers always or very often feel burned-out at work. Cigna 360 Global Well-being Survey suggests that 94% of all employees globally have experienced at least one symptom of burnout in the last 12 months.

Gaining a better understanding of what makes people thrive is therefore fundamental to making our organisations work optimally. Any changes will be complex, nuanced overlapping with all the other critical elements of sound and inclusive leadership.

We need to find new solutions to deal with this, not new names.

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My goal is to increase the number of gender balanced, diverse and inclusive workplaces where everyone feels secure and reaches their potential.

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??Unconscious biases affect all our decisions, but it is possible to manage them. Make your company?hiring processes?more inclusive so you attract, train and retain the best talent. https://www.3plusinternational.com