Quiet Quitting
The Great Resignation or The Great Quit. Now we’ve got Quiet Quitting. Initially, I wasn’t paying much attention to this latest buzz. Is it really anything new or unique?
Does quiet quitting mean that people are disengaging, as one commentator put it? Is not willing to go above and beyond a job’s requirement—read: not giving 120% effort for 100% wages—as another stated, really a negative attitude on the part of employees?
Peter Cappelli, Management Professor at The Wharton School, described it in sensible terms in his article, Quiet quitting: Why it is exactly what should be happening today for HR Executive. In a desire to have a better balance between work and life demands, employees pushed back on calls to perform extra work. Post-pandemic, it’s gotten interpreted as a general slacking of effort that is more focused on employees working from home.
Remember 2020 when everyone, including executives and regular employees, was working from home? When everyone managed, adjusted, and got work accomplished? There was hand-wringing over annual performance appraisals that year, and a colleague posted on LinkedIn to “Leave these poor people alone. They have suffered enough for one year.” Indeed, employees and managers went through a lot that year.
Now, organizations and their employees are regrouping after having had time to reflect. Cappelli reminds us that pre-pandemic we were in the middle of rethinking how to manage performance, but that work never got completed. The thinking was to move away from those traditional, annual performance reviews and ratings to a model of more frequent feedback. We discussed other trends taking place during 2020 in our blog post Ratings & Reckonings.
What’s happened since then, and why hasn’t the work on revising performance management been completed? Cappelli offers that the role of supervisors was squeezed down—no time, no training—and more tasks were added to their workload, preventing them from monitoring, engaging, and managing carefully.
Post-pandemic, remote work and hybrid work models are emerging as the new normal. Executives want employees back at work, perhaps because they don’t know how to measure productivity in this new environment. Admittedly, supervisors who are closest to the workers, must expend more effort to manage people who are physically distant.
Cappelli argues that going forward, we have to get better at managing performance—engaging and supporting employees and holding them accountable. It comes back to the supervisors who we tend to forget are employees too. They deserve attention, training, and resources to do their jobs—to manage those employees entrusted to them as part of their team whether those employees are in close proximity or remote.
As we approach Boss’s Day, which is Sunday, October 16, it’s time to cut those supervisors some slack and honor them by providing training, tools, and resources to do their jobs. Redistribute some of those tasks that were piled on to their workload and let them focus on their teams. Let’s get back to the work of redesigning performance management.
The Manager’s Answer Book provides a roadmap for coaching and counseling employees. See pages 59 to 61 for actions supervisors can take to help an employee get back on track. It’s a great resource for managers at all levels. And follow us this month as we talk more about this so-called quiet quitting.