By Jim Lundy
The Workplace in 2023: Overcoming the Quiet Quitting Era
The term “quiet quitting” emerged during COVID and employees found clever ways to do the minimum amount of work to get by. Hence the term “quiet quitting”.
With massive layoffs happening in Silicon Valley all of a sudden there were fewer jobs to go around.
The question remains however is this era of quiet quitting over or do we have a permanent problem with workplace productivity?
Quiet Quitting – A Response to Unhappiness or Lack of Motivation?
When we look at the whole issue of getting work done during COVID, it happened at a time when people were working remotely. While many employers espoused the benefits of remote work, the problem is that many employees decided they didn’t want to work that much.
If you wonder why many employers want their teams to come back to the office it might have something to do with reduced productivity.
I want to point out that I manage remote teams for many years and with the right goal-setting and performance objectives you can have very high-performance teams that work remotely.
However, during COVID many enterprises didn’t set performance objectives for their remote teams. Also, some teams were just not that interested until people learned and encouraged others to do the minimum to get by.
The Challenge of Motivating Associates
Well, there definitely appears to be an issue with the desire for people to work hard, there is also the challenge of motivation and focusing on a mission that the team wants to accomplish. COVID was a very strange time and for many associates, it was also a lonely time. So my take is we’re still kind of in what I call a COVID funk.
I was at a conference before COVID where Gina Haspel, CIA Director spoke there. She claimed that her team could outwork any team in Silicon Valley that took up the challenge. She explained that CIA teams are focused on missions and not just on work. There’s a big lesson from what Gina shared.
However, what she really shared is a management technique that many teams have used for hundreds of years but has kind of fallen out of favor in recent times. Setting a goal to launch a new product or a new service and getting the team to buy into it was a challenge for management.
How to Overcome Quiet Quitting in 2023
What are the biggest shifts that managers can make to increase productivity to prevent quiet quitting?
The key is to focus on missions and not just on tasks or performance objectives. Missions are a higher-level construct that could be highly motivating particularly if there is a deadline associated with accomplishing it.
The other big thing that enterprises need to focus on to avoid quiet quitting is the quality of hiring. There will always be people that do not perform and instead of managing those people out of the business, they end up becoming the loudest critics of management.
Just like before COVID, associates that are not performing need to be put on a performance plan. If they respond, that’s great. If they do not respond, poor performers can become cancer within the enterprise if they are not dealt with.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that some of the issues we have currently with the motivation of different workforces at different enterprises have to do with poor goal setting, poor expectations, and a lack of focus on a mission.
High-performance companies do these things and this is a lesson for all of us. To reduce quiet quitting, spend time with your associates, set goals, and put development plans in place to enhance their skills so they can climb the ladder and be the best that they can be.
It may take several years for the quiet quitting era to leave us but some of the things discussed above are surefire ways to take back control of how work gets done in your enterprise.
Catch Jim LIVE on January 23rd, 2022 with VP of Research, Betsy Burton for a complimentary webinar on the
“Top Ten Technologies for 2023 and Beyond.”
This blog is a part of the Digital Workplace blog series by Aragon Research’s CEO,
Jim Lundy.
