Don’t You Want Me?
So now we have ‘Quiet Quitting’ consultants who, for only £1,500 a day will come and run programmes to combat this heinous practice of people DOING EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE PAID FOR!!!
I suppose it was inevitable, really. I mean, if you create a problem that doesn’t exist, then someone’s going to come along and sell you some solution that doesn’t work to fix your problem that doesn’t exist.
And then, when your employees continue to persist in doing what you pay them to (which they will because the anti-Quiet Quitting programmes won’t work), you will have a new problem. ’Quiet Consulting’, where consultants come and deliver the programme but don’t deliver the results that were promised and then claim it was because of the way you implemented it.
But that’s OK because then you can blame the failure of your employees to do more than you pay them for (the intransigent slackers) on the useless consultants that you hired.
Then everyone’s happy and the scam cycle will move on to something else and this will join the long list of fake crises that were used to hoover money out of dim-witted bosses.
And all the employees will sigh, roll their eyes, and get back to whatever nonsense they’ve been asked to do today.
Just An Illusion
It’s OK, though, because someone else has said that the real problem is the ‘Loud Labourers’ (I think the problem is that the half-life of a new, meaningless but alliterative label for some completely normal phenomenon is now only about 4 hours, buy hey-ho). These are the people who spend most of their time telling everyone how hard they are working whilst achieving three parts of diddly-squat.
The problem is that these are the ones who get the promotions and the pay rises because they get noticed by the bosses, whilst the ones who have their heads down getting the work done (even whilst they are ‘Quietly Quitting’, no doubt) get overlooked.
Look, I absolutely know what a ‘Loud Labourer’ is (or ‘knobhead’, as we used to call them). We’ve all come across them, the ones who only join a project just before it completes, claim all the credit and then get trollied at the closing party. The ones who spend all their time telling everyone how busy they are but never get any actual work done.
The ones who show off to the boss like an adolescent schoolboy trying to get the PE teacher to pick them for the football team and then pretend said PE teacher is really matey with them in an attempt to garner some reflected glory. The ones who make every little thing they do (which isn’t much) sound like the ascent of Everest. Solo. In swimming trunks and flippers.
And we also know that the office is the perfect stage for these performative wankers to strut their stuff on, the natural home for their business-casual peacocking. And we know that bosses are all too easily taken in by this and promote these vacuous turds to their pre-destined level of incompetence and beyond.
We don’t need a new label for these problems. We need some new solutions. Moving away from office-centric working, with its presenteeism, impression management and ‘work theatre’, towards distributed teams, peer assessment, outcome measurement and other progressive practices are what needs to happen.
And that doesn’t even need a new label. Not even an alliterative one.
Walls Come Tumbling Down
The US Department of Labour reports that employment amongst the disabled has reached an all-time high due to the opportunities brought about through remote working. This is undoubtedly excellent news and is a real and tangible benefit of the new ways of working ushered in by COVID. I guess every cloud has a silver lining.
It’s my view that any organisation that doesn’t allow remote working doesn’t have a DEI policy worth the paper it’s written on. I’d go further and say it should be actively encouraged if you are serious about addressing DEI.
It’s not just a compliance issue, though. There’s a large pool of untapped talent out there that remote working can give you access to. In a tight labour market, particularly for highly-skilled and capable knowledge workers, it just makes good business sense.
Of course, it’s the right thing to do and that, in an ideal world, would be enough. However, we’re far from that and so it’s good that there are sound business reasons for doing it too. And even better news that it’s happening.
The King Of Wishful Thinking
Just to prove how far we are away from an ideal world, there have been a couple of studies this week that have shown that bosses really want to get their staff back in the office (as Christine Armstrong put it in her weekly video, “The Kings want their courts back”. She’s well worth a follow, if you’re not a fan already).
What’s more, they think the impending recession will give them the whip hand and they’ll be able to drag everyone in. Some are saying that in three years time it will be back to 5 days a week.
This is not going to go well, is it?
If you think ‘Quiet Quitting’ is a problem right now, wait until you have an office full of resentful employees, tired out from commuting and feeling like shit because they don’t have time to exercise and they’re eating crap food again. On top of that, they now have to fork out for extra travel costs, expensive sandwiches and coffees and sky-high child-care expenses. And they had to buy a whole new wardrobe of ‘business wear’. All because YOU made them come in so that you feel better, even though it means they are less productive than they were at home.
But hey, all the innovation, creativity and collaboration will be going gang-busters, right? And the culture will be absolutely fizzing. Or is that seething?
It’s as if they want their employee engagement scores to track the Conservatives’ poll ratings, heading lower than the Marina Trench.
I’ve said before that I think some big companies are going to go down because they can’t adapt. Those who refuse to adapt are going to be architects of their own misfortune. What was that about the current government looking like a death cult?
Talkin’ Bout A Revolution
I had great fun chatting with Lizzie Benton on her podcast, “Make it Thrive: The Company Culture Podcast”. Lizzie’s a Company Culture Coach and a fellow Pirate, and she’s a lovely host, so we had plenty to talk about.
Lizzie was very effusive about my Not-Newsletter and I’ve picked up a few new subscribers since the episode dropped on Monday, so I felt under a bit of pressure this week! I hope I’ve matched expectations. If you are a new reader and would like to say hi, I’d love to hear from you. My Deets are at the bottom.
If you’re an existing reader, I’d like to hear from you too! It’s always a delight to get your comments and hear your thoughts.
And if you’d like me to be on your podcast, that would be cool too, just give me a shout.