How a culture of wellbeing can help end ‘quiet quitting’

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by Andi Campbell

 

Over the past few years, many factors—including the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, supply chain issues and worker shortages—have presented challenges for both employees and employers. These challenging situations have led to poor mental health, burned-out employees, and increased stress levels in workplaces in nearly every industry. Fed up with the lack of support from their employers to compensate for additional tasks and time spent at work, employees have created their own system to achieve better balance and improve physical and mental health. Social media has sparked workers to turn to the internet to share their own stories of “quiet quitting.”

Quiet quitting, the act in which employees set clear boundaries without leaving their jobs, is a Gen Z-fueled trend that appears to have started on TikTok. The movement has gained traction on the platform, with #quietquitting gathering more than 20 million views. Many who support the practice label it a misnomer since it does not actually involve quitting, but instead, encourages workers to stop going above and beyond the work and time they are being paid for in their professional roles.

For employers, this new trend may be a cause for concern. Fueled in many cases by “American workers’ guilt,” employers have for many years benefited from the so-called “hustle culture,” which encourages employees to do more than what they have been asked to, work longer hours than needed, and assume their corporate identity as their personal identity, without added compensation. However, this glorification of non-stop work as a lifestyle has reached its peak, opening the door to quiet quitting and widespread pleas for support. Continue reading →

Embracing Diversity with a Growth Mindset

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by Ko Kuwabara, INSEAD, and Jiyin Cao, Stony Brook University

 

Getting along with others is about more than just having things in common.

When it comes to falling in love, people – broadly speaking – tend to fit into one of two categories. Those in the first category think the best relationships are formed quickly, spontaneously and organically. Fireworks and instant chemistry are par for the course, while trying to “make it work” is a sure sign that the relationship perhaps isn’t meant to be.

Individuals in the second category place less of an emphasis on natural compatibility and reject the notion that it’s only true love if you don’t need to work for it. They think of relationships as muscles that can grow and stretch with the right recipe of effort, care and compromise. Even if two people don’t click immediately, they can cultivate a bond by setting differences aside, attending to mutual needs and committing to each other.

Those in the former group are likely to have a fixed mindset when building relationships, where the basis of compatibility is natural chemistry or whether you click effortlessly. Meanwhile, those in the latter group often have a growth mindset and believe that compatibility can be nurtured over time. And while neither approach is necessarily better than the other, possessing a fixed mindset can hold people back from interacting with those who are different.

Extending these concepts to the workplace, our research with co-authors Soomin Cho and Paul Ingram investigates how differences in people’s beliefs in the nature of relationships – what we call lay theories – affect how they foster connections with dissimilar individuals in a professional environment. This has crucial implications for diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Interactions in diverse teams

Workplace interactions often require people to establish relationships with others from diverse backgrounds. These differences can be surface-level or demographic qualities – such as race and age – as well as deep-seated, dispositional attributes including values, attitudes and psychological traits. Although it’s vital to get along with people who look different, it’s perhaps more challenging to achieve compatibility with those who think differently. Indeed, the full benefits of building cross-cutting ties across demographic boundaries can be curtailed if employees continue to favour those with similar deep-level attributes. Continue reading →

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 →