“Quiet Quitting” isn’t a new phenomenon. But this buzzword is setting the internet on fire – stoking fears in managers about employees who are ready to throw in the towel, and exasperating employees who view their work-life balance as a healthy boundary and not a personal fault.
So, is Quiet Quitting a sign of morale failure? Or is it just a sensationalized term to describe a normal working environment. Let’s go beyond the buzzword.
The labor market has been extraordinarily volatile over the past two years. Employees are more and more seeking new careers and jobs that align with their purpose and personal goals. They have choices. Employers are trying to gain tailwind in a fluctuating economy and learn how to communicate with employees in a distributed organization which can lead to over-tasking employees. As people seek employment with teams that value their contributions with rewards like better work-life balance, corporations are being forced to reckon with the changing desires of today’s labor force. Some say that companies that aren’t keeping pace with these changes are being left behind and suffering from increased turnover, low employee satisfaction, and poor performance.
Quiet Quitting measures employee contribution by responsiveness and hours worked. The true metric to capture is how engaged and motivated an employee is – that's what ultimately contributes most to company goals and vision. At the deepest level, this is what employers are seeking, and it's what ultimately drives performance.
“Quiet Quitting” is a new term for people doing their job as they were hired to do and refusing to take on additional responsibilities. However, this is far from a new concept: Quiet Quitting is a hyperbolized term for something employees have been doing for years.
Quiet Quitting doesn't mean that a worker has left their job – rather, it describes a number of general behaviors, including setting boundaries and declining to work in the evenings or on weekends. The metric of employee contribution is measured here by responsiveness and hours worked. However, the true metric to capture is – how motivated is the employee to engage and contribute to the company’s success?
Regardless of where the term comes from, the stigma of Quiet Quitting can be traced to the undefined prescription for employee health and wellbeing contrasted to company’s striving for stability and viability in this changing economy, which in the end causes more problems than it solves. Corporations that succeed in fostering employee well-being and resulting productivity track motivation and engagement as the drivers of contribution. Listening to what employees value and ensuring that the company is providing the targeted support that their teams need is the way forward. “Quiet Quitting” isn’t really the problem – rather, the problem lies in measuring the wrong metric for contribution. Leaders must realize that retention maximizes ROI – the fiscal impact of resignations, rehires, and retraining makes maintaining and valuing employees essential for the financially efficient organization in the wake of workforce attitude shift.
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The solution is not measuring and increasing employee engagement through traditional means (monitoring mouse clicks, mandatory team-building exercises, empty platitudes), but rather through targeted interventions based on meaningful employee feedback. That’s what RippleWorx lets you do – through intentional pulsing techniques designed based on years of research and feedback, RippleWorx has developed solutions that allow you to understand exactly what demands and resources your teams need to be engaged, productive, retained, and successful. With proven data metrics to measure motivation, knowledge and skills, and organizational context, RippleWorx provides clear, actionable solutions to meet the ever-changing needs of your people. RippleWorx uses this data to provide subject-matter-expert derived content specifically constructed to drive motivation.
Our bottom line? Your people are your greatest asset, and we can show you how to keep them.
#BeyondTheBuzzword #QuietQuitting
