The Quiet Quitters

Stop chasing symptoms

12-Minutes read

Image: BedexpStock via Pixabay.com adapted by Butterfield & Wirth 2022.

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Quiet quitters are the employees who do the minimum in the workplace. Yet, it is now believed that they are not lazy, they are just disillusioned. This is a helpful perspective to consider and thus something that we are more able to resolve than intrinsic laziness. Let’s try and make some sense of this situation and help quiet quitters become more engaged and remain.

Prior to COVID hitting the world, the level of employee engagement had slowly risen from a global average low of 12% in 2009 to a high of 22% in 2019, whilst a good sign the levels were still low enough for concern. However, since the high in 2019 the global level of engagement appears to be on its way down again with the latest figures showing some worryingly low levels amongst individual major economies.

The UK has been identified as being particularly prone to this decline with just 9% of the workforce considered engaged, which makes them 33rd out of 38 European countries according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce (2022) report. The USA fairs better with 33% engagement whilst the global average is 21%; with little difference between gender (F 23%, M 20%) and age groups (<40 = 20%; ≥40 = 23%). Something for those who blame it all on the younger people wanting do things differently, to think about.

Given that people spend a significant amount of time working, the report asks, “how is life at work for people?” The news is not good; 60% are emotionally detached and 19% are miserable. Things don’t get much better when other areas of work-life are discussed, which is pretty awful considering the average time people spend in work is just under 2,000 hours per year.

Many organisations are trying to improve the work-life balance and have introduced shorter working weeks, working from home (WFH), and many other initiatives. Yet the problems remain. The UK probably has more people still working from home by percentage post COVID than many other countries and yet their level of engagement is still significantly low.

For example, the August 2022 update of the UK Office of National Statistics 2021 report states: “In February 2022, 84% of workers who had to work from home because of the coronavirus pandemic said they planned to carry out a mix of working at home and in their place of work in the future. …The proportion who planned to return to their place of work permanently fell from 11% in April 2021 to 8% in February 2022. … While the proportion of workers who planned to do hybrid work has not changed much since April 2021, however the hybrid working pattern has shifted more in favour of spending most working hours at home.”

This latter point reinforces this current desire of people to change their work-life balance, which is tending to see people spend more time WFH. The question is, does WFH improve the work-life balance? Jon Clifton, the CEO at Gallup, writes about the work-life balance compartmentalisation as being too simple and maybe an impossible boundary to find, let alone make. My colleague Dr Ross Wirth and I discussed this in the May 8, 2022, edition of our newsletter Management Minefields (The Big Quit – challenging the hype and solutions).

If organisations want to have employees who are more engaged in what they do at work, the changes need to be made in the workplace. Based on prior Gallup research on the causes of workplace stress, Clifton calls for changes in both the mindset and how leadership and management operate to help resolve the situation. This makes sense and yet is it that easy?

According to their own research we are talking about 79% of the workplaces globally need to have a new management and leadership mindset and behaviour. “Great work for the change professionals and training business”, I say tongue in cheek. However, given the seriousness of the current world economies, material shortages, inflation-driven worker disputes, the impact of changed weather patterns, etc., the business environment alone says that it is time for real action. By action, my colleague Dr Ross Wirth and I mean a complete change of perspective in how organisations view work and what this means in terms of its structure and how it is operated.

Given the way that organisations are structured and the primary roles of leadership and management currently, Ross and I suggest that a more fundamental change is needed. After all, none of this is new. A whole industry is blooming on leadership and management methodologies, behaviours, and change. Yes, the current approaches to leading and managing the people side of operations need a substantial re-think, yet these alone will not re-engage the workforce. The whole system is designed for compliance rather than motivation, which is just what the current rebellion and demand for an improved work-life balance is feeding upon.

We see no point in optimising the components of a system, most of which stem from and support the hierarchical management process, unless we first establish what components are needed and where. This is where traditional perspectives need to change. In the linear causation world-view optimisation tends to be the first stage of approaching changes, whereas it should be one of, if not the last stage before you get into automation; optimising leadership and management will not solve the issues around engagement alone. Beware of convergent logic.

Space X example

Whilst Elon Musk is often considered in the same vein as the British savoury food spread Marmite (you either love it or hate it) even his detractors agree that he does things differently and by most measures successfully. For example, NASA has existed since 1958 and is one of the founders of space flight and exploration. Then in 2002 a young upstart sets up a space company to reduce costs and introduce totally new ways of seeing and doing things in the industry. The whole idea of cheaper and reusable rockets was the butt of many jokes.

The ancient mariners of space just laughed and said, “no way will this work”. Fast forward and today not only is NASA a major customer of Musk’s Space X business, but also competitors are emerging, which is probably one of the best indicators that he has got a lot of things right. To achieve this, he identified 5 important steps that help to see, understand, and do things differently; optimisation does not come until step 3 at the very earliest. It is the third step because it is very common and possibly the most common error of a smart engineer to optimise a thing that should not exist.

New thinking about engagement of people in organisations is required

The first point to consider before even considering changes in an organisation is to make sense of the current situation. Do people want to be engaged in the organisation for which they work? What does engagement mean and is it different to motivation?

Much is written about how engagement is important and leads to a happier worker who then is more active and productive. The authors of such publications and the gurus/experts then follow this up by introducing ideas for engagement strategies based on various management theories. Further, HR driven performance management systems and associated rewards are introduced to increase, maintain, or encourage the employee’s motivation and engagement. Allied to these are a plethora of IT analytical systems to measure and identify the level of engagement achieved, individual and/or team. The overall aim is to achieve improved outcomes and shareholder value; industrial age mindsets and thinking are the drivers of such approaches, we suggest.

Yes, there is significant research to show that a happy worker tends to be more productive. Is this due to motivation or engagement or both is the big open question that needs to be considered in the context of helping the disillusioned worker.

Even though the needs, interests, concerns, and expectations of the workforce were clearly changing prior to the pandemic, the last two years have helped people to crystallise even more what they want from work. Where many of them may have seen the advance of technology as a threat prior to COVID, significant numbers of people have now experienced how technology can give them more control over how, when, and where they work. In the case of the rare species of knowledge workers, they clearly now have the upper hand (For more about Knowledge Workers see our 12 June 2022 Management Minefields newsletter).

Whilst some organisations welcome the newly emerging hybrid approach to work, others struggle to accept it for a range of reasons including the potential for it being divisive in complex work systems. Whatever their view, it is important to make sense of the following question if we are to help retain the disillusioned workers.

Do the people who are now not going to return to the company buildings have a different view to management and experts about what being motivated and engaged means?

Even at a basic definitional level, motivation is different than engagement. A person may be engaged in something but not absorbed in it because they have a feeling and sense of "have to”. This is the compliance aspect that most organisations’ performance management systems create, not motivation.

Motivation is the "why" or reason we act; engagement is typically the "what." However, engagement can also be an emotional commitment, which is where most commentators tend to focus, we suggest.

Whilst it may be hard for the academics, gurus, experts, and leaders to acknowledge, the number of people who come to work for no other reason than to receive sufficient money to live is probably the majority of the global workforce. This is their primary motivation for work, economic survival. Their level of engagement (loyalty) is linked to that focus and not to the company itself. Whilst some readers may have the image of poorer regions of the world falling into this category, it is important to realise that it is not limited to any geographic or socio-economic group; just keeping up with the loan payments on the house in rising inflation is but one simple example.

If we then look at the other people at work, study after study over decades has shown that being a valued member of the organisation is, after pay, the most important motivator; people want to be part of a community. Being a valued member of a community is what helps them to feel happy and content in what they do. (This is the subject of our next Management Minefield newsletters of August 21 and 28, 2022. It is such an important subject about the future of organisations that we spend two issues discussing it.).

Experience of decades shows that except for communities of practice (CoP), the current majority hierarchical design and control of organisations stops other forms of community developing and flourishing unless management consciously avoids trying to control them.

Currently, people do not feel part of a valued work community within which they have a say in how work is undertaken and managed. They feel a lack of control over what they do and receive only information that others believe they should have, not necessarily what they want or need. The list goes on and none of it is new. There is always a ‘rationalised’ or ‘justified’ reason for the status quo between managers and workers, albeit we can tinker around the edges with development programmes and analytical reports telling us what is wrong.

Stop playing musical chairs

As management sit in a workshop to brainstorm new ideas to help engage and motivate the workforce I am reminded of the game of musical chairs. A person is eliminated from the game when the music stops, and they are not quick enough to sit on a chair. In the end, it is usually the strongest and or luckiest who wins, not normally the smartest. Are we at risk of doing this in the workplace by continually re-designing the same old processes to achieve the same outcome or should we stop optimising in this way and start to think differently?

An IT example of unnecessary optimisation

It is common for IT businesses to have some form of customer service support system. It typically works based on receiving an email or phone call from a customer who has a query about how to use the product or to inform about a malfunction, for example.

When the demand creates queues, it is common for the IT engineers to decide to design a new process to optimise their queueing and work allocation systems. Yet, this does not reduce the work. It may increase work demand because people receive a quicker response to the initial contact and instead of trying to resolve the issue themselves, they contact support. Yet, optimisation is the first go to for many organisations.

Where do we go from here?

If organisations really want to have workers who achieve the best possible level and type of outcome from their work, they need to deal with the underlying problem and not the symptom that they call engagement.

Engagement is a moveable feast dependent on the individual view and not something mandated by management or a management consultant or guru. If the outcome that is wanted is a happy and content workforce, then that is where the focus needs to be, we suggest. It may mean that they are engaged, it may not. It usually means that they have a motivational force to work, which may not be one that the organisation knows about or understands.

If we design organisations with the focus on achieving the successful work outcome first, we can then identify with those who deliver this work what this means in terms of processes, management, and leadership. In approaching it this way we may even succeed where others have failed, that is build an organisation that is one community focused on doing a good job that leads to financial success.

Dr Ross Wirth and I call this Futocracy. It is not one model to fit all kinds of work. It is a philosophical approach built with an effectuation mindset, it consists of a set of Principles and guidelines to deliver the organisation’s Purpose, with a management system based on the premise of distributed authority and decision-making. There is no line management in the traditional sense of control, albeit there are other forms of control that support the decision-making processes to achieve the goals of the organisation.

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Over the next two weeks we will be discussing the importance of “communityship” and its future role in effective future-proof organisations.

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For more about our work you can join us at:

https://www.futocracy.network

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If you want to see how one person really built several communities, business and social, that come together like a Russian doll, we encourage you to watch a short video at:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hamdi_ulukaya_the_anti_ceo_playbook