The Ugly Truth Behind Quiet Quitting

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Transcript:

[00:00:00] I am back this week with a recorded article on what has become a very big buzzword- quiet quitting.

[00:00:09] It has been featured in Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, BBC, Fortune, CNN, NPR. I can keep going with all the alphabet soup of online and published trade journals and magazines and newspapers. And all of them are talking about quiet quitting, and it's even on Tik Tok, but what does it mean?

[00:00:38] Why is everyone talking about it? Why has everyone gotten on the quiet quitting bandwagon and why are there such diverse opinions about quiet quitting? And then we have to talk about the opposite- quiet firing. We don't see that buzzword used as much as quiet, quitting, because it has a different implication that is definitely very negative for businesses. But my personal opinion is that quiet quitting also has a very negative implication. For businesses who find their employees quote, unquote practicing this method. So quiet, quitting is described as people just doing the bare minimum of their jobs and not doing extra or not going the extra mile.

[00:01:41] And some people have even called it oh, it's just what we used to refer to as slacking. Well, if we start digging into what quiet quitting is, it's about setting boundaries. It's about doing the job that you're paid to do. And not taking on extra duties. And maybe if you are an employer that is paying someone for 40 hours of work, but actually expects them to do 65 then it does look like they're slacking if they're just doing the job that you paid them to do. Or if they're going home on time.

[00:02:19] But I have to tell you this, I would potentially be considered to be in the older generation at almost 53 years old and I would never consider someone doing the job that they were hired to do as quiet quitting or slacking. They're doing the job that you said you wanted them to do when you hired them.

[00:02:45] Now let's dig into this a little more. Because many years ago, I was teaching a class for a group on time management. And a woman in the group said that it was all well and good for me to go home from my job on time, but her husband worked at the Pentagon and he couldn't leave early because he was expected to always be available. And he worked for high-level people. Now, he was not military personnel. He was a civilian.

[00:03:23] And I said to her, I said, that sounds to me like boundaries have not been set. And she was really, really upset with me and said, I just didn't understand his importance. Well, the interesting tidbit of this was that at the time, I had a job that required me to be available 24x7 as a critical mission personnel.

[00:03:49] But I went home on time. Every day. Unless there was an actual crisis. And if something happened in the middle of the night, I was always available. But something that I established very early on, because I knew the only way to manage the situation of being 24x7 available was to set boundaries. So very early on, I established what the definition of an emergency or mission critical situation was.

[00:04:27] Now some of you may find it shocking to find out that there wasn't already a definition, but there was not, and I refused to live a life that had me constantly scrambling to pick up from other people's inefficiencies or poor planning. As we know the saying, your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part. And we had to work on that. And there were some times where I had to remind people very strongly of what an emergency was and not to call me for something that they just didn't bother to figure out on their own.

[00:05:08] So I set those boundaries. So when she made this pitch that her husband was just all that and a box of chocolates and couldn't possibly set boundaries, I just let the conversation go because there was nothing I was going to say to her that was going to change her opinion. But, if I could set boundaries in that situation, then it is always possible to set boundaries.

[00:05:37] So when we hear about quiet quitting, and about people just only doing the bare minimum, what we're really saying is that managers, because I hesitate to call them leaders, managers have not planned and executed properly and therefore expect everyone to pick up the slack and the poor planning. Because one of the things I work with teams on is managing your own expectations on the amount of work that you can actually do and set your goals, according to that ability. So if you have a manager who was not leading, but is using more of a command and control, then it is a likely scenario that they are not even consulting and working with their teams. And when you have a situation like that, where people are just not involved and rather they are told what the deadlines are and what the expectations are, you have a situation where either the work doesn't get finished OR people are working extra hours and scrambling around like hamsters on a wheel trying to keep up with the impossible demands of the job.

[00:07:07] So quiet quitting I find to be a rather offensive term, because it really just means that people have decided they aren't going to be on the hamster wheel anymore that they never should have had to be on the first place. So, what we need to do is stop using terms like quiet quitting and actually address the real problems we have in these organizations where people feel this is necessary. Now, for those of you that are not in the United States, you may be going, I don't even understand this term. I go to work. I have a work contract that stipulates what I do, and that's what I get paid to do, which is the case in many, many countries.

[00:07:51] But in the United States, there are not work contracts with set obligations. There are job descriptions that lay it out. There are handbooks, but there are not work contracts like there are in other countries. And also the United States has fostered a culture of work to prove your worth. So the more you work and the more you show up, and the more time you put in, and the longer you're there after the boss leaves, the more worth you are seen to have, and that is how people are deemed to be successful. So of course, if you only do the job you were hired to do in a culture where everybody is expected to do more to cover for the inefficiencies or the lack of planning or the unrealistic expectations, then yes, you are seen as a slacker.

[00:08:44] Now I was never accused of being a slacker for going home on time. And I always encouraged my teams to do the same thing. In fact, I had one situation where I had to threaten an employee to cut off his access after a certain time, because he didn't stop working. And it's not because he felt beholden to me or the organization, he was just a bit of a workaholic and he really liked what he was doing, so he didn't stop, but that was at the expense of his family. So we had to teach him how to put some boundaries in place to protect him and his family from his own behaviors. And we had to reprogram his behaviors. But in general, I would always work with the team to set realistic goals that we could achieve. Work towards those, learn how to inspect and adapt and change when we needed to and alert, if something was going wrong and we weren't going to make our goals. And then I was able to communicate to senior leadership exactly what we were and were not able to do. There was no guesswork in it because we, as a team had made these decisions. When you do not have that going on in a company, or you have senior leadership, who quite frankly, doesn't give a damn how many hours people are working, as long as they're getting their bonuses and their extras, then you have a toxic culture that isn't going to work, and those people are going to be seen as the quiet quitters. But interestingly on one post I saw someone come back with, yes, but companies have been quiet firing for a long time. And quiet firing is defined as repeatedly not compensating people for the work they are doing, not improving the work conditions so that those people leave because they don't see any reason why over and over again they should be going above and beyond. So, this is just a very interesting thing to me. I'm going to be watching how this whole concept of quiet quitting plays out.

[00:10:52] But for those of us working in the agile space, this is something that we have worked with organizations for many, many years to avoid because we are working to goals. And we are inspecting and adapting and we are having retrospectives to check in and see what is going on. And we are transforming little by little to make sure that we have a culture where everyone is involved in what is happening. And then you don't see that term being applied to those organizations.

[00:11:23] So the interesting observation out of all of this is that if this term has taken hold as much as it has. And there are that many high level news outlets writing about it. And it's being discussed on all the socials. This tells me that we still have a lot of organizations going about things in a very, very wrong way. And that we still have a lot to do. In transforming organizations into healthy work cultures that enable the people inside to thrive and the people outside to benefit from the value that they provide. I guess that means I'm not going to be out of a job anytime soon.

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INDRA A. BOOKS

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