How to Prevent your Employees from “Quiet Quitting”

With almost 500,000 likes and 42,000 shares, this TikTok video on “Quiet quitting” has blown up on social media.  From NPR to the New York Times, everyone is talking about it.  Miz Management will take a big leap of faith and assume that most of her readers are not surfing through TikTok to learn of the latest workplace trends.  And when she did an informal poll of her mostly Boomer and Gen X colleagues, there was a lot of misconceptions of what quiet quitting is. 

First let’s start with what it isn’t.  It’s not quitting your job.  It’s not doing the bare minimum needed to not get fired.  It’s not punching in and punching out of your job and not caring about it when not on the clock.

So what, exactly, it is?  It’s a reaction brought on by burnt out employees that had blurry work/life boundaries during the pandemic.  It’s a response to the frustration that companies are achieving record breaking profits that are being shared by executives and shareholders, without any benefit to employees.  It’s a backlash to being expected to check email and respond to work demands at all hours of day/night/weekend.  It’s a cry for balance and an appeal for a direct correlation between excelling in your performance and your compensation. 

To be fair, it’s a tight labor market and employees have the upper hand.  However, in any market, it’s important that employers provide the right environment for their people to be engaged and thrive in their roles.  If you want to make sure your employees don’t quiet quit on you, here are four suggestions:

1. Respect Work/Life Balance – Don’t expect your employees to respond to your 8 pm email unless it’s truly an emergency issue that needs immediate resolution.  Don’t schedule your team “bonding Zoom” meeting during family dinner time.
   
   
2. Measure the Right Things – Unfortunately, our culture often values looking busy over actual productivity.  Measure actual performance quality and output, not whether you see your employee’s status light as “online” on Saturday afternoon.
   
   
3. Compensate Fairly – It’s hard to feel engaged working for a company with large profits and tiny raises.  If you’re measuring the right things and see good performance, then bust open the wallet for raises and bonuses.  Money can’t (entirely) buy happiness, but not paying fairly is a sure path to quiet quitting (or “working your wage”). 
   
   
4. Nurture Their Career – Are you providing performance feedback?  Offering learning opportunities?  Providing a varied and interesting workload?  While not all jobs have the ability to do these things, to the extent that you can, try to help your people achieve new career milestones.

Quiet quitting is ultimately just setting appropriate boundaries and, if necessary, scaling back when your boss has unrealistic expectations, isn’t appreciating your work, or investing in your career.  If employers do the right things, your staff won’t be quiet quitting, they’ll be loudly staying!