Quiet Quitting Leads to Better Definition of Engagement
Quiet Quitting. You must have heard the phrase. Did you know it’s somewhat controversial?
In many ways, I support quiet quitting - setting and enforcing boundaries around your work enables people to avoid burnout, create meaningful connections with others, and ultimately live a fuller life. Managers with good boundaries model this excellent behavior for staff and there’s a positive ripple effect across their team.
The flip side of the debate over quiet quitting is really a discussion about employee engagement. For years, trainers and consultants have told managers that the way to recognize an engaged employee is to see the people “who go above and beyond.”
Perhaps that was never the best definition of engaged employees to begin with.
People who make a habit of going above and beyond are then expected to always be the ones who do more - and if the overall workplace culture does not normalize taking breaks then these wonderfully engaged employees can easily become unengaged, burned out, quiet quitters. Breaks can be everything from a mid-week walk away from work conversations to taking a daily lunch break to not checking email on vacation - or they may look like something else entirely.
A better definition of engagement is to inquire:
How employees feel about their work
How employees feel about the company - and their own specific supervisor
Whether employees ever get so caught up in work that they lose track of time
Whether employees feel like they can make decisions about how they get their work done
When the answers to these questions are positive, then your employees are engaged. If the answers are neutral, your employees are unengaged. If the answers are negative, your employees may be disengaged - which means they either have one foot out the door or are actively undermining some the work you do.
Yet instead of looking at that last category - which is actually going to cost the company money - too many managers and leaders are focusing on the people who are slipping from engaged to unengaged.
I loved DEI specialist Michelle Silverthorn’s advice for managers on quiet quitting:
Be specific about what you're seeing - don't just generalize to "quiet quitting."
Be honest about your expectations and assumptions, and where they come from in your own experiences!
Get to know your people so you understand, specifically, what makes them motivated to stay and succeed in the role and company.
Don’t denigrate people who are setting boundaries. Stop normalizing being workaholics.
Client Story
One client has, on paper, a company-wide policy to not hold meetings on Friday afternoons. Yet it is well-known that the leadership team regularly meets at this time - formally meets, with calendar invitations and agendas. And some of those leaders are also well-known for then working past official business hours, daily.
What message does this send to staff?
That leaders are above the rules.
That only lower-level staff need a meeting break.
That there is a disconnect between what leaders do and what they say.
That leaders never stop working, so maybe if you want to be a leader or viewed well you shouldn’t either.
That having no life outside of work is the way to get ahead.
None of these messages support engagement! None are positive! And they may be adding to quiet quitting within the organization.
A better definition of engagement might help those leaders reconnect with their teams and better understand how they’re feeling about the work they do.
Abuse?
In the above example, I don’t think true, outright abuse occurred - there’s a genuine disconnect between preferred work habits of leaders and what they have been told is a good policy to have. (Maybe they were never properly explained the “why” of a no-meetings policy.)
But: If you rely on the old definition of engagement and only reward the people who give and give and give and do all the things not part of their written job description, then at best you are taking advantage of people. You’re telling them they can do all the things they are told to do and still not be rewarded.
If you only ever expect the people who stepped up in the past to step up in the future, you’re denying growth opportunities to many.
If you expect that people who don’t set boundaries will never want to set boundaries around work, then you will have problems if and when they change their minds - and that may happen in the midst of a true tragedy or major life change, periods that are generally stressful even with support.
The concept of an engaged worker is an important one and I’m not ready to stop using it. But allowing the concept of what engagement looks like - how we define it, what examples we give - to be exploitative is not helping anyone.
Let’s celebrate the quiet quitters and ask real, hard questions to better get to know each other at work.
