Quiet Quitting: What senior leaders must do to foster lasting engagement

There’s a new threat to your organisations health… it’s called quiet quitting.

Following the great resignation of pandemic times and a challenging recruitment market, individuals are now turning instead to a new way of working, called quiet quitting.

Employees are no longer out-right quitting their jobs, they’re disengaging to do the bare minimum of work required to fulfil their roles.

But before you start pointing the finger at the workers, we need to look instead a little deeper to see what sits underneath this new workforce trend.

If employees are no longer willing to go above and beyond or take on extra responsibilities without recognition or fair compensation, what’s driving this change?

Reasons behind the Quiet-Quitting trend

1. Burnout - after the pandemic, many workers reported experiencing increased workloads, under tougher work conditions, with greater job insecurity and more stress. For some, quiet quitting is in direct relation to burnout, where the balance of exchange, the give and take was called in for review.
2. Frustration around career progression - some employees feel that their efforts are not being rewarded or leading to promotion, leading them to pull back from discretionary effort
3. Changing work-life priorities - many people reevaluated their work life blend through the pandemic as remote working gave people a flavour for a different way of working that may just give them more time back for activities they want to be doing
4. Unclear expectations - if it’s not clear what a good performance equals, employees can be left feeling dissatisfied, under acknowledged and unrewarded, and sometimes bitter and resentful, leaving them to revert to doing the minimum

The trend of quiet quitting is leaving organisations with reduced productivity and trickier team dynamics to navigate as tensions rises between the engaged and the disengaged. It's increasing staff retention concerns and cultures are being thinly held together, at risk of being degraded as quiet quitting spreads.

Leaders can address this trend in the following ways;

1. Increase the level and depth of communication - people are human beings, if they’re disengaged, there’s almost always certainly something that sits underneath it. You won’t be able to fix it, if you’re not willing to have an adult conversation to unearth the root cause
2. Reconsider your ways of working - if your business is in the camp of ‘back to normal’ following the pandemic, you may want to reconsider the flexibility available to ways of working. Being proactive on topics like health and wellbeing will reduce tendencies for quiet quitting
3. Unlock growth and potential in your people and teams - stagnating in a role is a direct route to the city of disengaged! Offer professional development opportunities, give stretch assignments and make sure your leaders are able to empower their people rather than micro manage then
4. Recognition and reward - does not always need to come in the shape of a promotion. And remember people like to be rewarded in different ways - some visible and public, some small and quiet.
5. Enhance your culture - a really easy way to enhance your culture is to make sure that your people have a voice, and you demonstrate as a management team, you’re willing to listen and take action on their feedback.

At this stage, it’s unclear whether the quiet quitting trend is here to stay and be part of our leadership evolution or whether it’s a short term response to the slower recruitment market. Either way, if you’re people are looking outside, you want to be shifting their attention back internally.