Hard Day’s Night
A new meme burst out whilst I was away on my hols, that of ‘Quiet Quitting’.
You know something is utter bollocks when it’s launched forth on a tidal wave of frothing indignation and fake fury.
In this case, it refers to the utterly heinous acts of employees who are insisting on doing what they are contracted to do and no more. It is about their utterly traitorous insistence on having and sticking to clear boundaries to prevent their work bleeding into their personal time. What villainous behaviour!
(“Wait a minute. Isn’t that exactly what you told them to do for their mental health as part of that well-being programme you ran during COVID?” “NO!! Shut up, get back on your yoga mat and meditate! In your own time, obviously”)
What’s happened is that, after years of gaslighting from employers exhorting them to ‘go the extra mile’, ‘give 110%’, ‘strive for excellence’ and all the other supposedly inspirational bollocks (whilst simultaneously cutting pay and benefits and increasing workloads), people have realised what a crap deal they are actually getting.
They’ve had time to reflect on what work is, what it means to them and how it sits amongst their other priorities in life and they’ve realised they’ve been putting way more in than they were being rewarded for.
They’ve realised that all the talk about culture and purpose and belonging was really just a ruse to con them out of their discretionary effort for free and they’ve decided they’d rather keep that time, money and energy for themselves.
I’ve written before about the enchantment that we all fall under in Corporate Wonderland, and how this is broken when we leave. Well, COVID and WfH effectively distanced us from the Corporate Wonderland and broke the spell. Now people can see the reality and they have adjusted their behaviours accordingly.
“Quiet Quitting” is an attempt by the employers to double-down on the gaslighting, to recast the enchantment. In doing so, they effectively admit that whole thing was an illusion in the first place.
It’s not ‘Quiet Quitting’, it’s doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay - and no more. It’s a perfectly rational (and in my view, overdue) response to the employment offer being made.
There’s an attempt to conflate this with the few who really are doing as little work as they possibly can. They did this before but the scope for avoiding work is even greater in hybrid working situations. The employers want to tar everyone as ‘idlers’. Let’s be clear, people who don’t do the work they’re employed to do are malingers and deserve to be disciplined. It’s a management failure if they are allowed to get away with it. It’s not a stick to beat honest people who protect their boundaries.
Counting Stars
This ‘Quiet Quitting’ has been going on for ages and, ironically, has been entrenched by the ‘efficiency’ process introduced by Jack Welch known as stack-ranking.
I’ve always thought this a self-evidently bad and immoral practice but it’s actually proved to be counter-productive (as we now know, Welch’s ‘success’ just showed it’s easy to look good in a rising market).
Stack-ranking is the process by which everyone in a team is ranked and put into a bell-curve. Effectively, everyone is scored between 1 and 10. People who are 4 and below are put on notice or sacked, those who are 9 and 10 get extra rewards.
The obvious stupidity of this scheme is that it makes you define some of the team as ‘poor’ when they could all be good performers, so you are forced to sack good people. To make this worse, last year’s top performer could end up at the bottom for all sorts of temporary issues, or even just timing i.e. major contracts taking over a year to complete, so they fall outside of the year.
But there’s something more insidious than that. If you are a good performer but you know you can’t get to a 9 or 10, there’s no point busting a gut to be an 8. On the other hand you don’t want to be a 4 or lower, so the obvious thing to do is aim for a 6, to make you safe with a bit of a margin for error. That’s score the gives you the most bang for your buck, the maximum reward for your effort.
So stack ranking promotes the very calculation that many more people are now making - do enough to justify your pay check but no more. It encourages you to dial back on effort that’s not rewarded. That’s the smart reaction to the offer being made. People aren’t ‘quiet quitting’, they’re wizing up.
The irony is that stack ranking promotes the very mediocrity that it is supposed to drive out. Good old Jack, eh?
Two Tribes
It’s really unhelpful to reduce everything to a binary and it’s a curse of the social media age BUT sometimes there are two sides. A relationship has two partners and in this case it’s the employer and the employee.
So whilst employers are accusing employees of ‘Quiet Quitting’ (and Business Insider reports that some managers are so upset by it that they're asking if they can discipline or fire the quiet quitters on their teams), what is their role in this?
I was going to go for decades of pitiful levels of engagement, dehumanisation, ‘downsizing’ and unmitigated streams of toxic bullshit but Cameron Kouvola came up with ‘Quiet Firing’.
Binaries can go two ways. They can become partnerships or they can become opponents. Unfortunately, it is the oppositional mindset that too many leaders have adopted. If they had gone for a partnership, we wouldn’t be talking about ‘Quiet Quitting’. Or ‘Quiet Firing’.
The future is in partnership. That means there needs to be dialogue. So my advice to those managers who are worried about ‘Quiet Quitting’ - go and talk to your people. And stop the ‘Quiet Firing’.
Down, Down, Deeper And Down
Well, I hate to be a Debbie Downer but the world of work is about to hit by an almighty shock here in the UK, as we approach the winter facing stratospheric increases in energy costs, whilst our government is AWOL choosing our next PM. The rest of Europe also faces significant, but much lower, price increases and possible shortages and they are taking steps to reduce consumption and prepare for rationing, to business in the first instance.
The focus is currently on how this will effect office attendance, as people redo their calculations, balancing the costs of commuting in against the costs of heating their homes during the day-time. However, this is not just an issue of domestic bills (frightening though they are looking) and personal preferences. The macro-economic effect of uncapped energy prices on businesses is what really concerns me. We could see hundreds of thousands of small businesses (and even a few larger ones) simply disappear as they are unable to pay energy bills, with the knock-on effects on employment and consumption that will, in turn, push many other businesses and households over the edge.
We are rapidly approaching a cliff edge and we have no-one at the wheel. If some dramatic action isn’t taken soon, we won’t be worrying about ‘Quiet Quitting’, Hybrid working, workplace wellness of any other the rest of it. The will be trivialities compared to the challenges we will be facing.
This is what’s keeping me awake at night. I lie there in ‘Quiet Despair’.
Let’s hope I’m over-reacting. Let’s act like I’m not.