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!

10 Tips for Better Project Planning

In David Letterman fashion, these tips will be counted down from 10 to 1.


#10 – Listen to what the client really wants. You like Escalades, the client wants a Prius. The best thing we can do as consultants is to listen carefully to what our clients are saying. By talking less and listening more, we can truly discern what the client is asking us to do.

#9 – Build in the quality. Quality management isn’t just a peer review at the end. It’s making sure the work is done right all throughout delivery. Make sure quality is built into the staffing and pricing of the project.

#8 – Discuss change management before there’s a change. Yes, that means you talk to the client during project kick-off on how she wants you to handle changes to scopes and fees if/when they become necessary. When this is decided up front, it’s easier to have that discussion later.

#7 – Think about what’s the worst thing that could happen. It’s not just for safety. An LPSA can also help you plan your project better. If there’s a large risk involved, make sure we have Plan B and maybe even Plan C in the works.

#6 – Build the right team. The best person for the job may not be in the next cubicle. It may be someone in another time zone. Make sure you’re using the resource sharing team to get the right skill set at the right salary level for the assignment.

#5 – Decide who can talk to who. Communication within a project context is very important. The PM may not want to be central to all communications, but you also don’t want 15 people calling your client. Same for regulators and other stakeholders. Discuss this at your kickoff meeting.

#4 – Tell your team their budget. If there are only 40 hours to do a report, tell your team member before they start. Waiting until 39 hours is already spent is too late!

#3 – Keep a change log. Things change during project execution. At some point you may need to write or call the client asking for a budget adjustment (euphemism for “more money”). You might forget all the changes she asked for or other conditions that require the adjustment. Keeping a change log with date, description of change, and what or who caused the change, will help making that request much easier.

#2 – Make your schedule detailed. A milestone table is a good start for developing a schedule. But you also need to work backwards from each deliverable date to account for quality management and peer reviews, addressing comments, printing and production time for the deliverable, and mailing or delivery of the final product. You might find that your schedule requires “pencils down” on a deliverable as much as two weeks before it’s due to the client.

And the #1 Tip for Better Planning…


#1 – Follow your plan! You worked hard to come up with a good plan. Don’t just file it away -- check it often to make sure you’re following it!



.

Question Authority? Yes!!

Every meeting has one of these. The person who always agrees with the boss. The one who echoes what the boss said with full affirmation that those are the wisest words ever spoken. He or she never questions what is said. This is the Yes-er. (Notice that I didn’t say Yes-man. These people come in both male and female versions). 

The boss loves the Yes-er. The Yes-er makes the boss feel great -- that the boss is the smartest, wisest person ever to run the company. But I would argue that Yes-ers (and those who love them) are harmful to well functioning organizations. It takes many great minds to manage a successful organization. No one person has all the answers or the perspectives needed to make sound decisions. 

A good decision maker hears the perspectives of many individuals, is open to learning and understanding alternate approaches, makes a thoughtful analysis of alternate ideas, and then makes the call. Is this “paralysis by analysis”? It need not be. Just because you get many ideas doesn’t mean you have to please everyone. But chances are that among those varying ideas is something you haven’t yet come up with, an idea that really gets you to where you want to be. 

Add diversity to your management team and see what great ideas you can come up with. Include men and women, experienced staff and recent grads, people of different backgrounds and races. You’ll get perspectives you never thought of. And if you’re the Yes-er, keep in mind that you are not adding value to the organization. Making your boss’ ego feel good might enhance your brownie-point score, but that’s about it. Your boss needs you to think on your own, to come up with something new and brilliant, to present an idea she hadn’t thought of. 

So – is it okay to question authority? Not only is it alright, it’s critical to organizational growth. Here’s how you do it – 

1. Think first, then speak. If you disagree with the point being made, makes sure you have an alternate idea based in facts or personal observations that you can defend. You can’t disagree with an issue unless you can propose a solution that’s better. If you don’t have something better to propose, then stay out of the conversation. 

2. Choose your venue carefully. Presenting a controversial or differing idea should not be done in front of a large group. Catch your boss in her office or send her an email with your idea. If you present your idea in front of a large group, your boss may need to dismiss it outright just to exert her position of authority. In a one-on-one discussion, the differing idea is less of a threat and that opens up the thinking process to a more open, collaborative approach. 

3. Choose your words carefully. Start with agreement on whatever your boss said that you do agree with. Then present your idea as an option or alternative that could also work. If you come off too strong, you’ll be an immediate turn off. 

4. Agree to disagree. There will be times when a decision will be made that you completely disagree with. You don’t have to agree with the approach to comply. The boss is still the boss. You can agree to disagree and do your best to respect the decision. After all, she still signs your paycheck. 

5. Repeat Steps 1 through 4. Not all your ideas will be winners, but the fact that you’re thinking about ways to do things better is something that all good bosses will appreciate. 

Don’t be afraid to question authority! Done right, it will help your career grow and make your organization a better place to work.

How to be "Most Wanted"

As the group manager of a staff of 15 people, one of my jobs is to staff people onto projects. Some of my staff are always busy because they are "most wanted". Others have a harder time getting staffed on project. With the recent difficult economic times, I've had to evaluate my staff and make sure that everyone I kept on was a strong contributor. I've starting thinking about the attributes of my "most wanted" staff which led me to develop a list of what attributes are needed to succeed in engineering consulting (or any career for that matter...)

1. Check your work. Maybe it's a Gen Y/Millenial thing (topic for another post, I'm sure) but young engineers these days hand in work to their Project Managers (PMs) that is incomplete or has errors. Perhaps the engineer is looking for preliminary feedback. Perhaps they were taught in school that if you hand in a crapy paper, the teacher will give you a critique and then let you re-write it. Well, I'm not your teacher and I'm not your mother. Before handing over your work, check it and double check it to make sure it's the best, most accurate work you can do. Don't expect others to find and correct your errors. What you give me should be your BEST work.
   
   
2. Be flexible. We all have to take on assignments that are not exciting or challenging. Gen Y/Millenials don't want to hear that you have to pay your dues, but guess what... you do. We all have to take on projects that are boring. At a minimum, do excellent work on it to prove that you're ready for more challenging assignments. Even better...find a way to improve the assignment or learn something new. Your ability to take anything on and do it well will help you succeed.
   
   
3. Be organized. You can't impress your team mates if you can't even find your stuff. Your office doesn't have to look any particular way, but whatever system you use, you should be able to find what you need when you need it.
   
   
4. Pay attention. When your PM gives you a task, listen carefully and TAKE NOTES. You don't want to go back to your PM and ask him/her to remind you of something they already told you. Ask questions if you don't understand something. It's much more preferable to ask lots of questions than to pretend you understand something and then do it wrong.
   
   
5. Have a good attitude. In addition to being flexible, be positive, enthusiastic, and have a good attitude about your assignments. Managers don't want to deal with someone who is always unhappy or complaining.
   
   
6. On time and on budget. Many project managers do a poor job of explaining how much time a task should take and/or when the task should be completed. Unfortunately, their lack of planning will reflect poorly on you when you deliver your work later than when the PM expected it. For every assignment, ask the PM when the work is due and how long you should spend doing it. Then do it on time and on budget. If you need more time, set clear expectations and communicate with your PM.
   
   
7. Take it to the next level. Your PM gave you an assignment and you're done with it. Is there any way you can add value to your deliverable? Can you summarize your results in a way that helps the PM make sound decisions? Can you research the options for the next step in the project? Don't just do what you were asked to do. Use that expensive college education to think about how you can make your deliverable even better.

The staff who can do these things are always in high demand and most likely to have long and successful careers at my firm.