The communication, empathy tactics you need to conquer ‘quiet quitting’

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By Tom Starner

There are plenty of theories floating within the HR universe about what “quiet quitting” really means: Is it a new phenomenon that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, or has this employee behavior been around forever under the guise of low-level performance?

Simply, dictionary.com defines “quiet quitting” as the “methods of reducing productivity or the amount of work one performs.” This definition describes that it can be driven by several factors, including “worker dissatisfaction, burnout, disengagement and the trend of deprioritizing work in favor of other aspects of life.”

Several recent surveys have gauged just how deep quiet quitting goes—and shed light on what HR should (and should not) be doing to tame this trend.

For example, Grant Thornton, the accounting and advisory firm, surveyed more than 5,000 U.S. employees this year and found that 49% are disengaged. These employees do not recommend their employer to friends and family as a great place to work; don’t see working at their current employer in six months’ time; and don’t feel inspired by their company to perform at their best.

“We estimate that the 15% with the lowest engagement score are actively disengaged and can be safely called ‘quiet quitters,’ “says Tim Glowa, principal, Human Capital Services at Grant Thornton.

Understanding the data around this trend is an important element for HR leaders looking to combat it. According to the Grant Thornton research, of the identified “quiet quitters,”:

  • 61% are female;
  • 42% are actively looking for another job;
  • 36% are millennials, 34% are Gen X, 21% are Boomers and 7% are Gen Z; and
  • 50% are customer-facing.

Alex Seiler, chief people officer at GHJ, a Los Angeles-headquartered accounting and business advisory firm, says these employees—and, importantly, their employers—need to be opening up the lines of communication to address what’s driving their disengagement. Continue reading →

Why science says employee recognition is vital

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by Mark Wachen

Employees don’t just want recognition. Science says they need it.

Many workplace surveys consistently show that employee recognition and engagement programs help drive results, boost productivity and improve the workplace through benefits like lower absenteeism.

Behind these statistics, though, sits a deeper psychological benefit that transcends the workplace and aligns with human psychology. Believe it or not, your high school psychology class may have taught you a thing or two about how to lead an engaged team. Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation, published in 1943, holds that humans have five basic needs: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

These start from the bottom and work their way up. Your physiological needs are food, water and sleep. Once you have achieved that, you want safety. Then you want love and a sense of community. Next comes esteem, both how you feel about yourself and your accomplishments, but also how others around you perceive and honor you. Finally, you have self-actualization, the ability to realize your personal potential.

All of Maslow’s needs directly affect employees. Companies satisfy the basic physiological need of humans by providing a paycheck that ensures they have money to afford a place to live with food on the table. The need for safety comes in the form of job security or stable contracts. Love and belonging are achieved by creating and fostering a strong workplace culture.

When it comes to esteem, employees can get it from their own sense of accomplishment from a job well done or from the praise of their colleagues and bosses. Continue reading →

Why Communication Breaks Down

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by Phanish Puranam, INSEAD, and Özgecan Koçak, Goizueta Business School

 

As workplaces become more diverse and work becomes more distributed, it is more important than ever to converge on a common code for effective communication.

Even if individuals are highly motivated to work together, they aren’t always able to do so effectively. That’s because communication remains a key challenge. The human ability to communicate what’s in the mind is miraculous; no other species does it with as much richness. Even so, we don’t do it perfectly. 

Communication is the grease that ensures an organisation runs like a well-oiled machine. Yet, miscommunication is persistent in our work and everyday lives. Miscommunication can range from harmless errors to tragic and costly ones. In 1999, NASA lost a US$125-million Mars orbiter spacecraft. The cause? NASA’s contractor had used English units of measurement for a key spacecraft operation, while NASA used the metric system. We each bring our own “codes” – languages, jargon and terminology – to a conversation, and if these are not the same, confusion and sometimes disaster ensues. But we can work towards becoming better communicators.

The many moving parts of communication

Communication problems tend to be complex. First, effective communication entails the interaction of many factors. The message sent by the sender interacts with how much the receiver already knows about it, whether the receiver understands the label attached to the subject, and whether the receiver can make the inference.

Second, communication is dynamic since it typically happens over time. Each time we attempt to communicate something, whether we succeed or fail, we change our understanding of the world. Learning takes place. If communication were a problem-solving game, the problem changes each time we play it.

Continue reading →

LEADERSHIP

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Early in the pandemic, Josh Bersin called it the Big Reset: “The Coronavirus is accelerating one of the biggest business transformations in decades.”

As the business landscape evolves and employees reassess their priorities, leadership is changing as well. To reset thinking on what it means to be a leader today, we asked Josh Bersin and other thought and business leaders for their perspective.

 

The biggest mistakes I’m seeing in leadership today are twofold: First, the one size fits all or square peg/square hole management style has proven ineffective when building a long term, sustainable growth model and often leads to high attrition. Leadership, like a coach, would be better suited looking for pockets of talent and moving them into positions where they can score, or defend based on skills. Rather than expecting all things from all people, expect individual value and position it accordingly on the field. Second observation, managing and motivating the next generation of professionals will require different styles of engagement and team driven performance/recognition. They will be less interested in being the first one in the office and last to leave, or willing to out work their smarter peers. After all, they have refined the work smarter not harder methodology – and it works. Lastly, leadership starts with the recruitment and onboarding strategies followed by having a mission that inspires the team, but transparent in terms of difficulties of the objectives.

-Gino Andreozzi, Business Development and Client Services Executive, Worldwide Technology

 

Leadership is all about having a plan, communicating that plan and then being flexible in how that plan gets executed. Your team needs to feel like they own the execution and feel like they are driving the plan to success.

-Bill Childress, SVP, Chief Revenue Office, NTT Data

 

Leadership is about convincing, not telling, people on your team to do important things they didn’t think they could do or may have initially resisted doing.

-Marcus Holloway, CEO, MTM Technologies

 

If you’re inspired by these perspectives on leadership today, stay tuned…there’s more to come!  And if you are interested in crafting your own contribution, please email me at janis@issg.net

3 types of meetings — and how to do each one well

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by Amy Bonsall

Meetings are broken. Something happened when work moved online in 2020 and opening up the office hasn’t fixed it. Every interaction with colleagues became a video call, and our days became a game of transactional Tetris: Where can I slot in this or that meeting? Now, with policies directing which days of the week to be where, the Tetris has gotten more complex.

In my work helping distributed and hybrid organizations flourish, I see employees commuting only to spend time in near-empty offices or on calls. It feels less like flexibility than a new constraint, and it’s not building the relationships we intended. It’s the worst of both worlds.

There is a better way. Instead of focusing on when and where we meet, we ought to start with why we’re coming together and let that dictate logistics. When I’m asked to help rebuild relationships and strengthen complex collaboration, I begin with foundational advice: The new work calendar isn’t about office or home, it’s about three gathering types and the conditions that serve them best.

Three Types of Gatherings
Why do I call them gatherings and not meetings? Names signal purpose. Meeting has a strong connotation, suggesting people around a conference table (or the online equivalent) and a tight agenda. Gatherings offer multiple purposes and release the idea that we must conduct a time-stamped march to check things off lists. Continue reading →