Understanding the Quiet Quitting Phenomenon

all right very good okay we're going to kick things off here we go my name is jess ray and i am the workforce strategist with magnet culture today i would like to welcome you to our workforce webinar and we'll be exploring today's quiet quitting phenomenon i'm sure that you all have seen that hashtag about quiet quitting trend in the news tons on social media there's still quite a bit of confusion around what that is and what on earth we're going to do about it so kara is going to be spending the next few minutes sharing her thoughts on this topic um it's a super hot topic so please send your questions and comments through the chat feature and care we'll get to those uh towards the end of today make sure you stay on for the entire session because we have some really exciting news to share um for q4 that we'd love to explore with you guys remember that all of our webinars are recorded and they're available at youtube.com forward slash magnet culture we've got tons of content and webinars on that platform today's webinar playback will be available within just a couple of days on that same page if you'd like to share those insights with your team and just as a little tip some of our clients will actually use those webinars as some kind of watch party training so uh cara let's dive into hashtag quietquitting hey hashtag quiet quitting all right we're gonna have some fun with this today um you all know that this is the newest phenomenon that's hitting after the great resignation and uh hashtag the great reset the great reshuffle all these names that folks are trying to latch on to some people do think that quiet quitting is kind of a quick fad and it's going to be here and it's going to be gone i don't know some people say we should certainly pay attention to quiet quitting a lot longer than that and so we will see but yes welcome to the session today we are working on the chat for some reason i don't know if y'all knew that zoom was down earlier today and luckily it's back up now for this session but we're working on chat so it looks like it's back up and running if you guys want to try it but also you can put your q a today in the q a box if you want to get those questions into me so welcome welcome everybody all right so today we're going to talk about what is quiet quitting exactly and also what it is not okay there's some confusion around that we're gonna talk about what caused this news grabbing movement and how it took off and then of course i will never leave you without sharing some strategies on how to respond how to address this and hopefully how to even avoid the quiet quitting uh side of things although once i explain exactly what it is you may have a little different perspective on this whole thing so all right what are we seeing um here's what quiet quitting is not quiet quitting is not quitting much to people's confusion uh quiet quitting is also not people not doing their job there was some initial confusion around oh it's people doing the absolute bare minimum and not getting fired and really that's not what it has kind of blown up to be what it really simply means today is enough is enough i am not going to continue to go above and beyond above and beyond above and beyond anymore because i'm tired uh i've given all i can to the company and i've sacrificed at home let's be honest a lot of folks with that above and beyond mentality have sacrificed at home and so now we're starting to see that pendulum kind of swing back right now people even vice presidents all right i talked to a vice president just a week or two ago and the words quiet quitting never even came up but when i said how are things going she said kara i'm just tired and um i'm good i'm i'm fine where i'm at of course i don't want to go any higher uh i i like my company but i just have to tell you i am not going to work my fingers to the bone anymore because i've just done that for too too long all right so um so this is not just about young workers it's not just about entry-level workers it's not about unskilled workers it's nothing like that this is hitting across all different spectrums of our workforce demographics okay so what it means is they're just not going to keep giving and giving and giving and giving another way that some people have defined it is it's kind of the opposite of the hustle culture go go go go and look at how my busyness is a badge of honor for me oh i'm so busy i'm so busy you know now a badge of honor for me is i'm not traveling for 10 gigs a month you know i love traveling and training and working with our clients but that's why i'm building out our training team and our speaking team so that we can serve more companies and more clients and more leaders and yet i don't have to get on a plane for every single engagement we can still meet the needs of those people right so it is the workforce saying i'm not just gonna go go go go go go i can't do that anymore all right so a lot of people are now saying the way it's being described and explained on linkedin and articles and other places is people are simply going to do the job they've been hired to do is that okay is that okay i absolutely think that that's okay for a good chunk of our workers think about this most of our workers most of our workers we'd be pretty happy if they showed up did their job and took their paycheck and went home right that's totally fine so a huge chunk of our workforce it would be fine if they just did that but the problem is we have just pushed and pushed and pushed people to do more than what's on their job description to do more than 40 hours a week or more than whatever their shift was supposed to cover we kept pushing and pushing and pushing and so if we think about it step back step back for a moment we think about it differently it would be totally fine if most of our employees had that kind of employer employee relationship in fact we had that type of employer employee relationship where you show up do your job during your shift and you go home we had that relationship for centuries with workers didn't we it was happening for a long long time but now this is more about i think we're we're constantly trying to come up with a new way to say work-life balance because work-life balance means different things to different people and work-life balance may be you know the morning flexibility for some people who have children to get to school or maybe they like to work out in the morning or they want their coffee before they can function you know that may be more work-life balance to people other people may want to leave right at five or four or six or whatever time their shift ends and others would say oh they're a clock watcher when really they just want to get home to get their kids get them fed get homework baths get to bed and then maybe they come back and work some more time right there's all different things but the problem is work-life balance means different things to different people and so i'm definitely seeing this quiet quitting phenomenon as it's just another attempt at the workforce saying we want more balance we want our lives back and we don't want that busyness so to go back to that for just a moment i think for the last 10 to 15 years how busy people were was that status symbol and that badge of honor of oh man you must be successful or you must be important because you're so busy all the time where now like i said i think some of the workforce or a good chunk of us now are saying i value the free time i value that flexibility and i value not being busy busy busy all the time so now freedom flexibility and even down time is deemed a badge of honor and kind of a new status symbol for a lot of people all right so um i also want to say that there have been a lot of conversations on my team and with our clients and partners and everybody else and i do want to clarify that quiet quitting for for most it is not people not working and it's not even people who are not giving it their all while they're at work all right that's really not what it is necessarily it just is that above and beyond threshold that people are resetting recalibrating back to what is expected from their job description okay so i just want to kind of debunk that a little bit it's not about people not working hard uh because you can absolutely work hard you think that vp that i talk to that she doesn't work hard when she's there and during her work hours heck yeah she does she is focused she is productive she is crazy busy during that time but then she has said i'm just not gonna work so much nights and weekends anymore okay so with that said i want to give a little asterisk here because there's a big difference between okay workers saying well i'm going to do quiet quitting and then they go down to even less than what's expected that's not okay we don't want anybody to do the bare minimum or to go less than the 40 hours or less than the job description requires this is more so for the people who are now seen as kind of overachievers but that has been normalized that everyone is supposed to be an overachiever okay so we want to make sure that we're recalibrating resetting back to the normal that we had a long time ago not the new normal which was 50 60 hours as expected for everybody can't can't get there okay so all right what caused this whole sensation i'm sure you guys already know this but there was a 24 year old on tick tock 17 second video that he posted and that went viral and he started the hashtag quietquitting saying i'm not going to do this anymore he was initially going against the hustle culture he said this is crazy you know i'm not going to do this and just keep working and working and working so i'm going to reset and and come back to the middle ground okay but here's the deal quiet quitting is not new you all know this right [Laughter] this concept of i'm not gonna go above and beyond i'm gonna go against the hustle culture i don't agree with that i don't think we should all work that many hours so here's something to think about and i'm gonna i'm gonna pop up something on my screen here for you all to see so take a look at this for a moment uh everybody's familiar with gallop right all the surveys from gallup and you're probably familiar with and you've heard for decades about engaged and disengaged employees okay so here's the thing this shows if you all can see this graph here this shows from 2000 to all the way to 2022 the surveys they've already done this year and you can see this green line on the top goes from anywhere from between 25 26 it looks like it starts at 26 of people and it goes at its highest up to you know 36 so 26 to 36 percent of people are fully engaged okay that has been for the last 22 years that there have only been about 30 to 30 you know 25 to 35 of people that have been actively engaged so think about a row boat that is people rowing the boat okay they're going in the direction the company wants us all to go in they are rowing the boat now you look at this blue line underneath here this one ranges at its lowest of 15 to it looks like the highest is 20. so 15 to 20 percent of our workforce from 2000 all the way over to which is currently at 18 for 22 years we have sat between 15 and 20 percent of people who are actively disengaged okay that means if we're rowing the boat this direction my friends that means those people they are not only looking the other way they are rowing the other direction so they are purposefully um you know maybe i don't know that it's sabotaging but they are definitely not on the same page and they are purposefully trying to not get us where we want to go okay now for all my math wizards what's left there in the middle if we add 32 percent of actively engaged people and 18 of actively disengaged people that my friends leaves 50 of people right in the middle gallup calls this group not engaged okay now they are not rowing in either direction they are not rowing forward they are not rowing backwards they're sitting in the boat chilling okay so those 50 of people and this has been for 22 years if not longer this is the data right here from gallup that shows for the last 22 years we've had half of our people just chilling and and following the current okay so we rely on those folks going above and beyond sure of those especially the 32 percent that are the overachievers the high achievers the high potentials that are pushing things forward and chances are think of it this way too chances are those are the people who have risen to the top of the org chart those are the people who've become the managers and the directors and the leaders of those organizations so it's really easy as one of those star players to turn around and say people need to be working harder they need to be rowing faster they need to be rowing in the direction i want them to row in it's really easy for us to take that mentality right so let me uh take that down for just a minute here all right so we need to realize that this quiet quitting thing is not new but it is going to now impact more of those high achievers we've always had people who did the job showed up took the paycheck and went home and we were okay with that sure we'd like more high achievers but we have to function with those type of workers as well to fill all the positions so now it's primarily the high achievers that are just saying whoa enough is enough and i have to now pull back to some extent okay so um a reason that i believe this hashtag really took off okay and this is not just a not just a hypothesis this is based on several conversations that i have had with executives as well is that when we say disengaged employees when the gallup surveys come out every year and say so many people are not engaged or actively disengaged all that language what gallup is doing is yelling at the company and saying company you need to engage your people more you have people that are disengaged and unengaged and you need to work to better engage them right so some companies said oh yes let's do that we will rise to the challenge and do that and others said what that's not my responsibility or i don't have time to deal with that or whatever the excuse was or the reasoning or whatnot and they didn't address it quiet quitting however flips the exact same scenario of people not wanting to go above and beyond right and being disengaged it flips the scenario it flips the script over to say well that employee is quiet quitting it's their fault they're the ones that aren't pulling their weight right and so it's a quicker way this is why i think the hashtag really took off is it's a quicker way for the employers to blame the employees now of course the hashtag went viral more so because the employees went yes that's me i don't want to work as hard anymore either you know so you had that side of the employees going yeah me too yes absolutely absolutely and then you had the employers saying this quiet quitting thing is ridiculous and jumping on board to give their two cents about it being the employee's fault does that make sense big difference between saying that disengagement is the company's fault which i wouldn't say there's any fault to be had but that's how it's perceived right disengage means the company has to fix it quiet quitting means the employee has done something wrong or isn't behaving the way that we want them to behave so they need to fix it okay so it's uh fascinating to me to watch the different stories and scenarios and now that i've explained it from those two different perspectives for you go back and look up quiet quitting with the hashtag on linkedin look at who's telling the story and what their perspective is think about your perspective have you been one to use it as as a blame game kind of scenario or have you been one to say i side with the employees on enough is enough and i'm glad that this is kind of a revolution that's going to reset things for some companies okay some some organizations so um now on the last webinar i'm sure several of you i see a ton of uh familiar faces or names on the list here today so several of you saw my webinar last month last month's webinar if you didn't catch it absolutely explains the back story of how we pushed our workloads out of whack over the last 20 years so definitely check that out i think our team just put that in the chat the link for that so we spent an hour i couldn't believe it went that long but a solid hour talking about how in the world we got to this situation of out of whack jobs and and job descriptions and workloads and things like that and so that webinar shares the back story on how we got there oh here's the here's the spoiler alert or the cliff notes version of that is do more with less we use that strategy for business and setting metrics year after year after year after year and so is do more with less and we just can't sustain that kind of model okay so quiet quitting is now the pushback of that do-more with less approach which by the way that approach outstayed its welcome in the work world so i'm really glad that we're starting to see some reset on that as well now here's another perspective for you many of you have heard me keynote you maybe have heard my story about loyalty from today's new workforce and the fact that when i was a child growing up as a millennial in the 80s and 90s my mom was laid off three times three times before i graduated high school so here's another deeper piece of that conversation my mom actually told me because she had been an accountant she was a corporate accountant and you know what they do at the end of every month they have to close the books and i remember as a child my mom's staying until 8 o'clock 9 o'clock 10 o'clock sometimes midnight because there was a system problem or a number that just wasn't matching something else but every single month my mom would stay late that last or first week of the month to close the books and she was salary she never got the next monday off after closing she never got to leave early on other days because she stayed late for three days closing the books she never got anything more than just some recognition of hey thanks for staying appreciate you getting the deadline hit all right so she told me after getting laid off from corporate accounting job after corporate accounting job after corporate accounting job even though she stayed late she played by the rules she told me cara hear me in this once you get a salary job you need to realize that any hour you work over 40 is a donation back to your company okay they don't owe you a dime for that they don't have to give you anything for working over 40. so that was pretty powerful for me when i was young and and granted i still worked hard not only did i work hard 40 hours a week in my 20s i was a bit of a workaholic and i stayed late in fact i remember one of my first roommates after college i got home at seven o'clock one night and my roommate said where have you been and i said at work and she was a couple years older than me but she left every day right at five o'clock and i was trying to get a promotion i was trying to advance my career very quickly in my twenties and so it was fascinating to me that she asked at seven o'clock where you been i said i've been at work and she just looked at me and said why do you stay so late all right when i yes i had that mentality of i don't i don't have anything owed to me by the company for staying but i was positioning myself i was trying to be the high achiever to position myself for a promotion that i knew was going to be available in the next year okay so i was proving myself and trying to you know just show off a little bit that hey i'm a high achiever and i can stand out among the rest so in my 20s i absolutely did that then once i had my kiddo in my 30s i said nope not doing nights and weekends anymore except for when i travel for work right but when i'm at my office then i don't do that anymore and so i made that conscious decision in my 20s that i would work harder because i had a benefit ahead of me okay so i tell you all of that because think about this working harder is absolutely beneficial for the people who are positioned for bonuses and promotion if people have the ability on their team within their company or maybe even to leave the company and go somewhere else right to look better on their resume if people are positioned in a way that they can get bonuses and promotions then it could make sense i can absolutely make the argument for them to work harder take on a job and a half put more on their plate stay till the job gets done all of that type of stuff right but let's be honest the hierarchy looks like this right so of our workers how many of them are going to become supervisors how many of those will become managers how many of those will become directors or senior leaders right it's fewer and fewer opportunities which means there's a good what 70 to 80 percent of our workforce that probably isn't bonused and in in general right maybe they get special bonuses for retention or recruiting or something like that but as far as just work bonuses they're not getting that they're not getting profit sharing and they're also not even positioned for a promotion some positions you have to go back to school and get more education to be able to go to the next level so those workers they're not aligned for any kind of promotion unless they go back and get another certificate or degree okay so i tell you this so we can reset our minds reset how we look at the workforce and why should people go above and beyond and you know take on that extra work particularly if their salary now there's the different argument to be made if they're hourly that they want overtime they'll get paid extra and things like that but today not everybody wants the extra shifts not everybody wants that extra pay even because maybe they're a dual house co dual income household and they already have 80 hours of pay so nobody wants overtime in that situation unless maybe they're saving up for something special but a lot of times people have family obligations other hobbies or work out or other things that they want to fill their day with so it's just not worth even if they do make money on the hourly side it's not worth it to them to take on those extra shifts okay so we have to really rethink that as well so i'm going to take that into our next section here of how should we respond how do we address this is there any way we can avoid it that type of thing and i'm going to start here with that mindset shift that i just kind of explained of who should be going above and beyond why should people go above and beyond and how many people what percentage of our workforce should we expect to go above and beyond on a regular basis okay so first put yourself in the staff's shoes okay first things first just put yourself in the staff's shoes would you jump on this quiet quitting bandwagon here because what i'm hearing from employees is that the organization has given them two jobs to do their job description their workload is out of whack and the company has no intention of resolving that that's what the staff tell me they say they've pushed and pushed and pushed and put more and more and more on me and they have no intention of ever taking it off because they just want to take advantage of me or they just want to push me as far as they possibly can with with my workload okay so part of it is that and then those are the people who are not only quiet quitting but also considering leaving the organization completely okay these folks tell me that they don't see a light at the end of the tunnel any longer because again the business model unfortunately has become reliant on staff making sacrifices on staff pulling that extra shift on staff staying late on staff coming in the next day okay i even have one client is in the concrete industry and they are not only scheduled for regular schedules but they are weather dependent you can't pour a concrete basement in a neighborhood if it's raining so they also have to sacrifice then if they were supposed to pour that concrete basement on friday now they've got to pour it on saturday because of the rain on friday okay so we're talking about massive sacrifices that some people have to make for schedule changes and things like that okay or for asking people to pull a double shift or fill in for other vacant folks that can be a major sacrifice at home and so the staff are telling me this is just their business model they're just going to keep taking advantage of us they're going to keep pushing more and more on our plates and expect us to do it as long as we're willing to do it right so that's where they're starting to wise up and say this isn't going to change as long as as long as i'm here right or as long as i keep doing it as long as i keep enabling them to have that kind of business model it's not going to change we're still in the staff's shoes all right let's think about this one so then i've worked hard i've stayed late my mom you know she stayed late she closed the books every month she'd stay late sacrifice those three or four nights a month from her family and what did she get at the end of the year a cost of living adjustment right so most organizations are still now we have some differences this year in 2020 as inflation has exploded and now we're finally doing more comp analysis and raising people more than just two to three percent but what are you going to do in 2023 2024 2025 what is your organization planning are they still going to go back to whatever the cost of living change is are you just going to try to match inflation because that's how a lot of organizations budget and so that's a situation where a person who stays till the job gets done and stays at the company year after year after year giving it their all they're not going to be necessarily rewarded for that without a promotion okay so the other piece that the employees are starting to figure out now and i mean some of them have figured this out long before but there's more talk about it now is if i work harder i don't make any more money again if i'm not positioned for promotion or bonus i don't make any more money by working harder by putting in that extra time again and again and again you know who makes more money the owners make more money the owners of the business grow the equity in the business they grow the profit margins they close more deals and we get more revenue and all of these things so your employees now are starting to realize that their hard work doesn't necessarily pay off for them in the end now it depends on your business and whether you're doing profit sharing and other types of bonuses but i'm just trying to give you the perspective of a lot of our staff today okay that that's now how they see that employer employee relationship differently and that's what's causing a lot of people to jump on that quiet quitting bandwagon so if you were in their shoes not positioned for promotion not positioned for bonuses would you keep staying late would you keep picking up the extra shifts i don't know i don't know it's it's hard to say right okay so let's get to some more strategies here one is create a plan okay this one's one of those easier said than done it's it's gonna take time it is a pretty big one that we're gonna we're gonna tackle is create a plan for reducing unsustainable workloads okay we have to start giving our staff their lives back and really taking work-life balance seriously as best we can i know some of you are 365-day operations right where my senior care friends at senior living that in healthcare you're working all year long all day every day and so it is harder in that situation but it is not impossible and so we have to uh take a look at swinging the pendulum back and getting back to realistic these are the key words realistic and sustainable workloads for our people okay so on the last webinar last month we talked extensively about how the workloads got out of whack and also how to reduce the workloads what does that look like step-by-step kind of guidance on that okay so go check out that webinar if that's where you really need to put in the time and effort at your organization another thing that you can do that's really really helpful and also very eye-opening for the leadership team ensure that your job descriptions are up to date okay i'm gonna let you think about that for a second ensure that your job descriptions are up to date do they have the realistic expectations in it of what a person's job load is going to look like and what their responsibilities are going to look like or have we continued to pile on and pie along now i know i'm guilty of that i have several staff that i continue to say hey could you leave this project hey could you also do this every afternoon hey could you check on this quarterly right i continue to ask them to do things over and over but i am a manager who is hyper vigilant at maintaining good workloads and so i'm constantly asking my team hey where's your capacity what's your workload look like uh how are things this week next week what's this month look like for you right so that we can prioritize things better we can move things to the back burner when needed right of course i want folks to get everything done that we've talked about but it's just not possible without getting those workloads out of whack so we prioritize every week or every month or every quarter depending on the department and that way we're able to keep those in check okay so i'm guilty of not always updating the job description but if my job description isn't up to date at least i'm still checking in genuinely with my people about their workload and about that plate okay so check and see if your job descriptions truly are up to date and that could be a really great place to start also you need to review and possibly adjust or recalibrate my favorite word your metrics and goals because a lot of the metrics and goals that i see for organizations are based on pushing people too far and that's not sustainable so now when people swing that pendulum back and say nope i am not going to keep working this hard right or i'm not going to keep taking on those extra shifts or whatnot then all of a sudden we start to miss the metrics we start to miss the goals and then the executives say oh this turnover's under out of control and you know we're under budget or under you know what i mean under on revenue we're we're in the red all these things they start to freak out because we're not hitting our metrics well it's because we were operating off of a business model that wasn't sustainable and so now we also need to talk with our teams discuss as leaders and certainly at the senior leadership team we have to say are the goals and metrics going into 2023 sustainable and even achievable are they realistic metrics or are we just honestly pushing our people away because we're pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing on them okay so that could be part of the reason for a lot of the turnover is that we've set unrealistic expectations and workloads on those folks okay another tactic that you can implement is to evaluate and set new expectations around after hours communication okay that's been a big part of the quiet quitting discussions that i'm seeing is people are saying okay i'm gonna do my job i'm gonna be a hard worker from nine to five eight to five whatever my shift is but i'm no longer answering emails at night i can't do that it's too disruptive to my family my marriage is struggling because of you know this i'm always on my phone or my spouse is always on their phone or whatnot it's just not worth it and i'm not present at my kids games on saturday morning because my work expects me to respond things like that so that's another way that people are saying okay i'm not in the office but i'm i'm actually going to cut off some of that after hours communication so one way to to really address this issue is to talk with your team about after hours communication now my team knows because i'm explicit with them first things first i don't work a lot of nights and weekends but when i do let's say i'm traveling okay i'm traveling to keynote in in santa fe and i have the night at the hotel and i want to i choose to get caught up on some work and do some things well my team knows if they get an email from me on a wednesday night at 8pm they do not need to respond in fact i don't want them to respond until their next working hours in fact i've tried to use uh i know google and outlook and other systems have have capabilities where you can actually set your email to go out the next morning because if people have notifications set up on their phone what happens at 8 pm when i send an email oh my gosh kara sent me an email i better read it and check it even though i've told them they don't have to they're probably going to read it anyway and then it's going to take up mental space for them if it's a problem they have to solve or something else they have to do when they get to work tomorrow they're going to think about that so it's even better if i wait and send that email i have it automatically scheduled to send the next morning so that i'm not disrupting their evening and making them feel like they don't have that work-life balance they want okay so you want to talk about after hours communication and this is also different depending on whether you have hourly workers or salary workers you may have to come at that a little bit differently but here's another thing i'm hearing a lot about and that is the people that are on call okay so the people that are on call they have told me i feel like i'm on call all the time i used to be the manager on duty one weekend a month or something like that where okay i was on call just at certain times of the month or one day a week or something like that and now they feel like they're just on call all the time well here's an interesting example that happened in one of my classes is there was a department head and he said how do i get the people at night to quit calling me they always call me to solve their problems can't they figure it out themselves why do they have to wake me up at two in the morning and i said okay well is it only night time that you're getting calls he goes oh yeah no second shift never calls me it's just third shift that calls me i said okay well why doesn't second shift call you to solve their problems he said oh well second shift has a supervisor oh you can imagine the look on his face when i just paused and i did what you know what is it the dog head tilt like right when i say do you want to go for a walk my dog goes i just looked at him and then he said oh i need a third shift supervisor he totally figured it out himself but he could not figure out until we had that conversation why he kept getting bothered in the middle of the night while the other shifts could take care of themselves right because he was typically first shift he had a second shift supervisor he had no supervisor so that's why he felt like he was on call every single night and yet he had somehow kind of done that to himself a little bit or the company had let him do that by not having the right structure in place to have a third shift supervisor okay so we have to make sure we got the right resources in place to keep us from being on call all the time and then there's another conversation maybe for another day about we also want to make sure that those who feel like they're on call all the time are not control freaks that have not empowered their team to make decisions without fear of retribution or getting in trouble for making the wrong decision and things like that so again that's a topic for another day but there are lots of reasons why some people feel that burden of being on call all the time and sometimes it's self-imposed and sometimes it's based on the company business model or structure okay so oh my goodness we covered so much stuff today so what is and is not quite quitting we talked about the cause of it and the phenomenon that took took off on social uh we talked about shifting our mindset around this issue as well as ways to address respond and even avoid the quiet quitting of our own team so as we wrap up um i would love for you to put your questions in the q a box i've got time today to answer some of your questions and we've already got a few that have come in here and so i'm going to pass things back to jess while i take a look at these questions and she's going to tell you about our exciting new program that we are launching this fall i can't believe it so yeah go ahead jess awesome i love it all the information for a hashtag quiet quitting now you guys can help school other folks out there on social etc um but if you've been following us for a while now i'm sure you've heard us say that training leaders is one of the best things you can do to retain their direct reports and even tr retain the leaders as well um it's the it's the fastest way to get the quickest results when it comes to retention and this is really true in a world of the quiet quitting as well good employees respond with loyalty and dedication they feel valued and invested in employees don't really quite quit when they're being developed and appreciated right so many of our clients know that training is the key to retention but as we have heard even before 2020 time is really such an obstacle for folks right now so if i get a hallelujah men or a big yes in all caps if uh in the chat if you'd love to train your employees but time seems to really be working against you i've got a couple coming in right now so we have listened to our clients in the market and we created a very unique special program that i'm very proud about it trains leaders in a format that works with our busy schedules so we've pieced together an engaging virtual training where participants there's about there's four components so first the participants will watch an on-demand 30-minute content video on that topic at their convenience whatever they'd like they can watch it once twice washing dishes in the office during lunch etc and then they come together on a 90-minute facilitated discussion that dives into working through actual issues works on application and brainstorming together so that is a huge teamwork opportunity as well after that call participants in the program have a very specific tangible tasks and goals that they will complete on their own time within the next four weeks we also send out a really great challenge video to keep those strategies and that concept top of mind when we launched this program earlier this year one of our clients literally implemented and changed company policies after that session the team came up with that during that facilitated discussion as a way to retain and improve the culture within the organization so this has got some big sticking power the program is pieced together using those four parts in order to make the time to complete the training and not use the pushback that our clients are giving us of i just don't have time for this so you got those four components that are pieced together that you can work at on your own time except for that virtual facilitated discussion that's the big part so normally we offer this program for companies right we get a cohort together they send their entire team together as that group but this fall doing something really unique we are offering the same leadership essentials classes except as open training courses meaning yeah right confetti meaning you can send just one leader yourself your co-worker uh the person who's been begging for that opportunity of extra engagement or folks who maybe need that extra engagement as we've talked about so one leader can be sent to that open enrollment course for 147. so if your company just didn't have the time perhaps to set up training for all leaders they didn't have the budget to send the leaders to a conference for example this is the time to purchase that single seat or a group of seats even for a group of leaders for 147 per individual so you'll go through that same program flow of the content again the video 90-minute facilitated discussion the action guide the challenge video it's just really great for small teams companies with a few new leaders uh companies that want to test out the program before you roll out something quarterly perhaps for the um whole company and this is the cool part that since you're on the webinar we are offering 50 off you just need to use the promo code webinar to redeem that that special fee so use the webinar uh code to get half off so for all my math geniuses 147 divided by two right so 75 bucks a person that's right which is huge right so the links to the three different classes are being thrown in the chat right now october's workshop is focusing on retention strategies november's workshop is on our generational dynamics within the workplace and bridging those gaps and then december is going to be improving leadership communication you can email ask at magnetculture.com if you have any questions about this program and then carol we do have a couple questions rolling in so let's answer some of these guys as time permits yeah absolutely um and just real quick to reiterate i just heard over and over you all people said we can't do half day training anymore we can't do full day training anymore 90 minutes that's all we have available for you can you come in and do 90 minutes well it is tough to change behavior in 90 minutes and so that's why we created this 90-minute live session coupled with that 30-minute content video with the four week action guide that changes behavior afterwards and that puts it into the busy lives of our managers schedule okay we can still fit it into their their schedule and and it's getting rave reviews this year from the groups that have already rolled out the program internally so yeah give us a call but hopefully you guys can send some folks in october november december to those classes as well so we're excited because some of our clients are just too small or not ready or don't have the budget to bring the training program in house just yet and this is a great way to get started doing that this fall so can't wait to see you guys all right so here's some questions one is as someone in hr for a company right how many of you are in hr woohoo how do we educate and influence the executives and owners on this new phenomenon when they're living and breathing the hustle culture okay so my first answer is send them this webinar recording and last month's webinar recording where we explained how this happened and you know the fact that is truly not sustainable i would say last month's webinar was even more geared toward executives and even if you can't get them to watch the videos or whatnot the key phrase is sustainability sustainability okay we're not talking about recycling kind of sustainability we're talking about sustainability of the organization will your organization be here in five years if you do not change this if you continue to work hustle hustle hustle hustle and expect expect expect and push push push push if you continue to do that as the workforce continues to evolve and shift their expectations and demands will your company be able to operate moving forward so that to me is the conversation we have to have and if you're in hr some of you already do this very well some hr friends of mine do not or they're not comfortable with it but you have to speak the numbers the cost of turnover the operational language about either deficiencies or mistakes or errors or missing client deadlines right whether it's services you provide or goods that you provide or care that you provide how are how are we missing the mark on the operations side because we have so many new folks coming in um are we not delivering at the highest level of quality possible so we talk about those metrics talk about high level of quality talk about the mistakes and the errors and the deficiencies and and missed deadlines and things like that the impact to operations and finance so know the cost of turnover know the cost of those mistakes know the cost of the um the new hire that is not up to speed yet and so they're only half productive for us if you know those costs and the operational impact of having so much turnover or having people that are burning out and things like that that's how we get the executive's attention and start to get the resources and priorities set that we need set for that okay so hopefully that answered your question and helped you with that uh gave you some ammo for those conversations but definitely you all that's why we share or i'm sorry we record these webinars is so that you can share it out with your team maybe even have a lunch watch party and say y'all we have to talk about this this is not easy to hear but we need to talk about this so let's listen and then have a candid conversation about our sustainability moving forward okay so that's a great way to address it as well another question came in oh so somebody asked about quiet firing which has also been a hashtag it's actually not at all related to quiet quitting directly but um it is another phenomenon people are talking about and quiet firing is more so when an organization wants someone to leave and so they make the job not pleasant for them so let's say um this happened to me this is another thing it's been around forever this happened to me in college i worked at a mall at a retail shop during college in the summertime i had told the manager i needed 28 hours a week to pay my bills and things like that so i needed at least 28 hours a week they said that's fine when they hired me then a few months in they got a new manager the new manager did not care for me so he put me on his first schedule at 10 hours a week and i went to him and i said whoa hey i need 28 plus to stay working here and he said well sorry i only have 10. i said okay well next week if you could get me back to 28 that'd be really great the next schedule comes out 10 hours so he didn't want to fire me he wanted me to quit so what he did is he made the situation unpleasant for me and he kept cutting my hours so we see this happen all the time it is a way for employers to avoid difficult conversations it is a way for them to avoid potential wrongful hiring disputes because they get the person to quit so sometimes people are doing the quiet firing by either overloading a person or underloading in my case where they didn't give me enough hours to work sometimes they purposefully give folks work they don't want to do and that is a way to push them away or they'll purposefully put them on a team with somebody they don't like or supervisor that they don't get along with or something like that so yeah that quiet firing is a thing as well if you hear that but it's very different than the quiet quitting side of things and it's more of a way to get people to quit without having to fire them i'm not a big fan of that i don't think it's i don't think it's the right thing to do in most cases but it certainly happens every day and has been happening in a lot of cases for years so all right well i think we are going to wrap it up right there so thank you all so much for your time and attention today i know you're busy so i hope that this webinar has been helpful in understanding this quiet quitting phenomenon and giving you yet again some more retention strategies for creating a better place to work creating better leaders on your team and for keeping the talent you cannot afford to lose so follow us on youtube at youtube.com magnetculture to make sure that you get the recordings as soon as they pop up of all of these free webinars and other programs from the stage so have a wonderful day everybody thank you so much for everything you do we'll see you later bye

all right very good okay we&#39;re going to kick things off here we go my name is jess ray and i am the workforce strategist with magnet culture today i would like to welcome you to our workforce webinar and we&#39;ll be exploring today&#39;s quiet quitting phenomenon i&#39;m sure that you all have seen that hashtag about quiet quitting trend in the news tons on social media there&#39;s still quite a bit of confusion around what that is and what on earth we&#39;re going to do about it so kara is going to be spending the next few minutes sharing her thoughts on this topic um it&#39;s a super hot topic so please send your questions and comments through the chat feature and care we&#39;ll get to those uh towards the end of today make sure you stay on for the entire session because we have some really exciting news to share um for q4 that we&#39;d love to explore with you guys remember that all of our webinars are recorded and they&#39;re available at youtube.com forward slash magnet culture we&#39;ve got tons of content and webinars on that platform today&#39;s webinar playback will be available within just a couple of days on that same page if you&#39;d like to share those insights with your team and just as a little tip some of our clients will actually use those webinars as some kind of watch party training so uh cara let&#39;s dive into hashtag quietquitting hey hashtag quiet quitting all right we&#39;re gonna have some fun with this today um you all know that this is the newest phenomenon that&#39;s hitting after the great resignation and uh hashtag the great reset the great reshuffle all these names that folks are trying to latch on to some people do think that quiet quitting is kind of a quick fad and it&#39;s going to be here and it&#39;s going to be gone i don&#39;t know some people say we should certainly pay attention to quiet quitting a lot longer than that and so we will see but yes welcome to the session today we are working on the chat for some reason i don&#39;t know if y&#39;all knew that zoom was down earlier today and luckily it&#39;s back up now for this session but we&#39;re working on chat so it looks like it&#39;s back up and running if you guys want to try it but also you can put your q a today in the q a box if you want to get those questions into me so welcome welcome everybody all right so today we&#39;re going to talk about what is quiet quitting exactly and also what it is not okay there&#39;s some confusion around that we&#39;re gonna talk about what caused this news grabbing movement and how it took off and then of course i will never leave you without sharing some strategies on how to respond how to address this and hopefully how to even avoid the quiet quitting uh side of things although once i explain exactly what it is you may have a little different perspective on this whole thing so all right what are we seeing um here&#39;s what quiet quitting is not quiet quitting is not quitting much to people&#39;s confusion uh quiet quitting is also not people not doing their job there was some initial confusion around oh it&#39;s people doing the absolute bare minimum and not getting fired and really that&#39;s not what it has kind of blown up to be what it really simply means today is enough is enough i am not going to continue to go above and beyond above and beyond above and beyond anymore because i&#39;m tired uh i&#39;ve given all i can to the company and i&#39;ve sacrificed at home let&#39;s be honest a lot of folks with that above and beyond mentality have sacrificed at home and so now we&#39;re starting to see that pendulum kind of swing back right now people even vice presidents all right i talked to a vice president just a week or two ago and the words quiet quitting never even came up but when i said how are things going she said kara i&#39;m just tired and um i&#39;m good i&#39;m i&#39;m fine where i&#39;m at of course i don&#39;t want to go any higher uh i i like my company but i just have to tell you i am not going to work my fingers to the bone anymore because i&#39;ve just done that for too too long all right so um so this is not just about young workers it&#39;s not just about entry-level workers it&#39;s not about unskilled workers it&#39;s nothing like that this is hitting across all different spectrums of our workforce demographics okay so what it means is they&#39;re just not going to keep giving and giving and giving and giving another way that some people have defined it is it&#39;s kind of the opposite of the hustle culture go go go go and look at how my busyness is a badge of honor for me oh i&#39;m so busy i&#39;m so busy you know now a badge of honor for me is i&#39;m not traveling for 10 gigs a month you know i love traveling and training and working with our clients but that&#39;s why i&#39;m building out our training team and our speaking team so that we can serve more companies and more clients and more leaders and yet i don&#39;t have to get on a plane for every single engagement we can still meet the needs of those people right so it is the workforce saying i&#39;m not just gonna go go go go go go i can&#39;t do that anymore all right so a lot of people are now saying the way it&#39;s being described and explained on linkedin and articles and other places is people are simply going to do the job they&#39;ve been hired to do is that okay is that okay i absolutely think that that&#39;s okay for a good chunk of our workers think about this most of our workers most of our workers we&#39;d be pretty happy if they showed up did their job and took their paycheck and went home right that&#39;s totally fine so a huge chunk of our workforce it would be fine if they just did that but the problem is we have just pushed and pushed and pushed people to do more than what&#39;s on their job description to do more than 40 hours a week or more than whatever their shift was supposed to cover we kept pushing and pushing and pushing and so if we think about it step back step back for a moment we think about it differently it would be totally fine if most of our employees had that kind of employer employee relationship in fact we had that type of employer employee relationship where you show up do your job during your shift and you go home we had that relationship for centuries with workers didn&#39;t we it was happening for a long long time but now this is more about i think we&#39;re we&#39;re constantly trying to come up with a new way to say work-life balance because work-life balance means different things to different people and work-life balance may be you know the morning flexibility for some people who have children to get to school or maybe they like to work out in the morning or they want their coffee before they can function you know that may be more work-life balance to people other people may want to leave right at five or four or six or whatever time their shift ends and others would say oh they&#39;re a clock watcher when really they just want to get home to get their kids get them fed get homework baths get to bed and then maybe they come back and work some more time right there&#39;s all different things but the problem is work-life balance means different things to different people and so i&#39;m definitely seeing this quiet quitting phenomenon as it&#39;s just another attempt at the workforce saying we want more balance we want our lives back and we don&#39;t want that busyness so to go back to that for just a moment i think for the last 10 to 15 years how busy people were was that status symbol and that badge of honor of oh man you must be successful or you must be important because you&#39;re so busy all the time where now like i said i think some of the workforce or a good chunk of us now are saying i value the free time i value that flexibility and i value not being busy busy busy all the time so now freedom flexibility and even down time is deemed a badge of honor and kind of a new status symbol for a lot of people all right so um i also want to say that there have been a lot of conversations on my team and with our clients and partners and everybody else and i do want to clarify that quiet quitting for for most it is not people not working and it&#39;s not even people who are not giving it their all while they&#39;re at work all right that&#39;s really not what it is necessarily it just is that above and beyond threshold that people are resetting recalibrating back to what is expected from their job description okay so i just want to kind of debunk that a little bit it&#39;s not about people not working hard uh because you can absolutely work hard you think that vp that i talk to that she doesn&#39;t work hard when she&#39;s there and during her work hours heck yeah she does she is focused she is productive she is crazy busy during that time but then she has said i&#39;m just not gonna work so much nights and weekends anymore okay so with that said i want to give a little asterisk here because there&#39;s a big difference between okay workers saying well i&#39;m going to do quiet quitting and then they go down to even less than what&#39;s expected that&#39;s not okay we don&#39;t want anybody to do the bare minimum or to go less than the 40 hours or less than the job description requires this is more so for the people who are now seen as kind of overachievers but that has been normalized that everyone is supposed to be an overachiever okay so we want to make sure that we&#39;re recalibrating resetting back to the normal that we had a long time ago not the new normal which was 50 60 hours as expected for everybody can&#39;t can&#39;t get there okay so all right what caused this whole sensation i&#39;m sure you guys already know this but there was a 24 year old on tick tock 17 second video that he posted and that went viral and he started the hashtag quietquitting saying i&#39;m not going to do this anymore he was initially going against the hustle culture he said this is crazy you know i&#39;m not going to do this and just keep working and working and working so i&#39;m going to reset and and come back to the middle ground okay but here&#39;s the deal quiet quitting is not new you all know this right [Laughter] this concept of i&#39;m not gonna go above and beyond i&#39;m gonna go against the hustle culture i don&#39;t agree with that i don&#39;t think we should all work that many hours so here&#39;s something to think about and i&#39;m gonna i&#39;m gonna pop up something on my screen here for you all to see so take a look at this for a moment uh everybody&#39;s familiar with gallop right all the surveys from gallup and you&#39;re probably familiar with and you&#39;ve heard for decades about engaged and disengaged employees okay so here&#39;s the thing this shows if you all can see this graph here this shows from 2000 to all the way to 2022 the surveys they&#39;ve already done this year and you can see this green line on the top goes from anywhere from between 25 26 it looks like it starts at 26 of people and it goes at its highest up to you know 36 so 26 to 36 percent of people are fully engaged okay that has been for the last 22 years that there have only been about 30 to 30 you know 25 to 35 of people that have been actively engaged so think about a row boat that is people rowing the boat okay they&#39;re going in the direction the company wants us all to go in they are rowing the boat now you look at this blue line underneath here this one ranges at its lowest of 15 to it looks like the highest is 20. so 15 to 20 percent of our workforce from 2000 all the way over to which is currently at 18 for 22 years we have sat between 15 and 20 percent of people who are actively disengaged okay that means if we&#39;re rowing the boat this direction my friends that means those people they are not only looking the other way they are rowing the other direction so they are purposefully um you know maybe i don&#39;t know that it&#39;s sabotaging but they are definitely not on the same page and they are purposefully trying to not get us where we want to go okay now for all my math wizards what&#39;s left there in the middle if we add 32 percent of actively engaged people and 18 of actively disengaged people that my friends leaves 50 of people right in the middle gallup calls this group not engaged okay now they are not rowing in either direction they are not rowing forward they are not rowing backwards they&#39;re sitting in the boat chilling okay so those 50 of people and this has been for 22 years if not longer this is the data right here from gallup that shows for the last 22 years we&#39;ve had half of our people just chilling and and following the current okay so we rely on those folks going above and beyond sure of those especially the 32 percent that are the overachievers the high achievers the high potentials that are pushing things forward and chances are think of it this way too chances are those are the people who have risen to the top of the org chart those are the people who&#39;ve become the managers and the directors and the leaders of those organizations so it&#39;s really easy as one of those star players to turn around and say people need to be working harder they need to be rowing faster they need to be rowing in the direction i want them to row in it&#39;s really easy for us to take that mentality right so let me uh take that down for just a minute here all right so we need to realize that this quiet quitting thing is not new but it is going to now impact more of those high achievers we&#39;ve always had people who did the job showed up took the paycheck and went home and we were okay with that sure we&#39;d like more high achievers but we have to function with those type of workers as well to fill all the positions so now it&#39;s primarily the high achievers that are just saying whoa enough is enough and i have to now pull back to some extent okay so um a reason that i believe this hashtag really took off okay and this is not just a not just a hypothesis this is based on several conversations that i have had with executives as well is that when we say disengaged employees when the gallup surveys come out every year and say so many people are not engaged or actively disengaged all that language what gallup is doing is yelling at the company and saying company you need to engage your people more you have people that are disengaged and unengaged and you need to work to better engage them right so some companies said oh yes let&#39;s do that we will rise to the challenge and do that and others said what that&#39;s not my responsibility or i don&#39;t have time to deal with that or whatever the excuse was or the reasoning or whatnot and they didn&#39;t address it quiet quitting however flips the exact same scenario of people not wanting to go above and beyond right and being disengaged it flips the scenario it flips the script over to say well that employee is quiet quitting it&#39;s their fault they&#39;re the ones that aren&#39;t pulling their weight right and so it&#39;s a quicker way this is why i think the hashtag really took off is it&#39;s a quicker way for the employers to blame the employees now of course the hashtag went viral more so because the employees went yes that&#39;s me i don&#39;t want to work as hard anymore either you know so you had that side of the employees going yeah me too yes absolutely absolutely and then you had the employers saying this quiet quitting thing is ridiculous and jumping on board to give their two cents about it being the employee&#39;s fault does that make sense big difference between saying that disengagement is the company&#39;s fault which i wouldn&#39;t say there&#39;s any fault to be had but that&#39;s how it&#39;s perceived right disengage means the company has to fix it quiet quitting means the employee has done something wrong or isn&#39;t behaving the way that we want them to behave so they need to fix it okay so it&#39;s uh fascinating to me to watch the different stories and scenarios and now that i&#39;ve explained it from those two different perspectives for you go back and look up quiet quitting with the hashtag on linkedin look at who&#39;s telling the story and what their perspective is think about your perspective have you been one to use it as as a blame game kind of scenario or have you been one to say i side with the employees on enough is enough and i&#39;m glad that this is kind of a revolution that&#39;s going to reset things for some companies okay some some organizations so um now on the last webinar i&#39;m sure several of you i see a ton of uh familiar faces or names on the list here today so several of you saw my webinar last month last month&#39;s webinar if you didn&#39;t catch it absolutely explains the back story of how we pushed our workloads out of whack over the last 20 years so definitely check that out i think our team just put that in the chat the link for that so we spent an hour i couldn&#39;t believe it went that long but a solid hour talking about how in the world we got to this situation of out of whack jobs and and job descriptions and workloads and things like that and so that webinar shares the back story on how we got there oh here&#39;s the here&#39;s the spoiler alert or the cliff notes version of that is do more with less we use that strategy for business and setting metrics year after year after year after year and so is do more with less and we just can&#39;t sustain that kind of model okay so quiet quitting is now the pushback of that do-more with less approach which by the way that approach outstayed its welcome in the work world so i&#39;m really glad that we&#39;re starting to see some reset on that as well now here&#39;s another perspective for you many of you have heard me keynote you maybe have heard my story about loyalty from today&#39;s new workforce and the fact that when i was a child growing up as a millennial in the 80s and 90s my mom was laid off three times three times before i graduated high school so here&#39;s another deeper piece of that conversation my mom actually told me because she had been an accountant she was a corporate accountant and you know what they do at the end of every month they have to close the books and i remember as a child my mom&#39;s staying until 8 o&#39;clock 9 o&#39;clock 10 o&#39;clock sometimes midnight because there was a system problem or a number that just wasn&#39;t matching something else but every single month my mom would stay late that last or first week of the month to close the books and she was salary she never got the next monday off after closing she never got to leave early on other days because she stayed late for three days closing the books she never got anything more than just some recognition of hey thanks for staying appreciate you getting the deadline hit all right so she told me after getting laid off from corporate accounting job after corporate accounting job after corporate accounting job even though she stayed late she played by the rules she told me cara hear me in this once you get a salary job you need to realize that any hour you work over 40 is a donation back to your company okay they don&#39;t owe you a dime for that they don&#39;t have to give you anything for working over 40. so that was pretty powerful for me when i was young and and granted i still worked hard not only did i work hard 40 hours a week in my 20s i was a bit of a workaholic and i stayed late in fact i remember one of my first roommates after college i got home at seven o&#39;clock one night and my roommate said where have you been and i said at work and she was a couple years older than me but she left every day right at five o&#39;clock and i was trying to get a promotion i was trying to advance my career very quickly in my twenties and so it was fascinating to me that she asked at seven o&#39;clock where you been i said i&#39;ve been at work and she just looked at me and said why do you stay so late all right when i yes i had that mentality of i don&#39;t i don&#39;t have anything owed to me by the company for staying but i was positioning myself i was trying to be the high achiever to position myself for a promotion that i knew was going to be available in the next year okay so i was proving myself and trying to you know just show off a little bit that hey i&#39;m a high achiever and i can stand out among the rest so in my 20s i absolutely did that then once i had my kiddo in my 30s i said nope not doing nights and weekends anymore except for when i travel for work right but when i&#39;m at my office then i don&#39;t do that anymore and so i made that conscious decision in my 20s that i would work harder because i had a benefit ahead of me okay so i tell you all of that because think about this working harder is absolutely beneficial for the people who are positioned for bonuses and promotion if people have the ability on their team within their company or maybe even to leave the company and go somewhere else right to look better on their resume if people are positioned in a way that they can get bonuses and promotions then it could make sense i can absolutely make the argument for them to work harder take on a job and a half put more on their plate stay till the job gets done all of that type of stuff right but let&#39;s be honest the hierarchy looks like this right so of our workers how many of them are going to become supervisors how many of those will become managers how many of those will become directors or senior leaders right it&#39;s fewer and fewer opportunities which means there&#39;s a good what 70 to 80 percent of our workforce that probably isn&#39;t bonused and in in general right maybe they get special bonuses for retention or recruiting or something like that but as far as just work bonuses they&#39;re not getting that they&#39;re not getting profit sharing and they&#39;re also not even positioned for a promotion some positions you have to go back to school and get more education to be able to go to the next level so those workers they&#39;re not aligned for any kind of promotion unless they go back and get another certificate or degree okay so i tell you this so we can reset our minds reset how we look at the workforce and why should people go above and beyond and you know take on that extra work particularly if their salary now there&#39;s the different argument to be made if they&#39;re hourly that they want overtime they&#39;ll get paid extra and things like that but today not everybody wants the extra shifts not everybody wants that extra pay even because maybe they&#39;re a dual house co dual income household and they already have 80 hours of pay so nobody wants overtime in that situation unless maybe they&#39;re saving up for something special but a lot of times people have family obligations other hobbies or work out or other things that they want to fill their day with so it&#39;s just not worth even if they do make money on the hourly side it&#39;s not worth it to them to take on those extra shifts okay so we have to really rethink that as well so i&#39;m going to take that into our next section here of how should we respond how do we address this is there any way we can avoid it that type of thing and i&#39;m going to start here with that mindset shift that i just kind of explained of who should be going above and beyond why should people go above and beyond and how many people what percentage of our workforce should we expect to go above and beyond on a regular basis okay so first put yourself in the staff&#39;s shoes okay first things first just put yourself in the staff&#39;s shoes would you jump on this quiet quitting bandwagon here because what i&#39;m hearing from employees is that the organization has given them two jobs to do their job description their workload is out of whack and the company has no intention of resolving that that&#39;s what the staff tell me they say they&#39;ve pushed and pushed and pushed and put more and more and more on me and they have no intention of ever taking it off because they just want to take advantage of me or they just want to push me as far as they possibly can with with my workload okay so part of it is that and then those are the people who are not only quiet quitting but also considering leaving the organization completely okay these folks tell me that they don&#39;t see a light at the end of the tunnel any longer because again the business model unfortunately has become reliant on staff making sacrifices on staff pulling that extra shift on staff staying late on staff coming in the next day okay i even have one client is in the concrete industry and they are not only scheduled for regular schedules but they are weather dependent you can&#39;t pour a concrete basement in a neighborhood if it&#39;s raining so they also have to sacrifice then if they were supposed to pour that concrete basement on friday now they&#39;ve got to pour it on saturday because of the rain on friday okay so we&#39;re talking about massive sacrifices that some people have to make for schedule changes and things like that okay or for asking people to pull a double shift or fill in for other vacant folks that can be a major sacrifice at home and so the staff are telling me this is just their business model they&#39;re just going to keep taking advantage of us they&#39;re going to keep pushing more and more on our plates and expect us to do it as long as we&#39;re willing to do it right so that&#39;s where they&#39;re starting to wise up and say this isn&#39;t going to change as long as as long as i&#39;m here right or as long as i keep doing it as long as i keep enabling them to have that kind of business model it&#39;s not going to change we&#39;re still in the staff&#39;s shoes all right let&#39;s think about this one so then i&#39;ve worked hard i&#39;ve stayed late my mom you know she stayed late she closed the books every month she&#39;d stay late sacrifice those three or four nights a month from her family and what did she get at the end of the year a cost of living adjustment right so most organizations are still now we have some differences this year in 2020 as inflation has exploded and now we&#39;re finally doing more comp analysis and raising people more than just two to three percent but what are you going to do in 2023 2024 2025 what is your organization planning are they still going to go back to whatever the cost of living change is are you just going to try to match inflation because that&#39;s how a lot of organizations budget and so that&#39;s a situation where a person who stays till the job gets done and stays at the company year after year after year giving it their all they&#39;re not going to be necessarily rewarded for that without a promotion okay so the other piece that the employees are starting to figure out now and i mean some of them have figured this out long before but there&#39;s more talk about it now is if i work harder i don&#39;t make any more money again if i&#39;m not positioned for promotion or bonus i don&#39;t make any more money by working harder by putting in that extra time again and again and again you know who makes more money the owners make more money the owners of the business grow the equity in the business they grow the profit margins they close more deals and we get more revenue and all of these things so your employees now are starting to realize that their hard work doesn&#39;t necessarily pay off for them in the end now it depends on your business and whether you&#39;re doing profit sharing and other types of bonuses but i&#39;m just trying to give you the perspective of a lot of our staff today okay that that&#39;s now how they see that employer employee relationship differently and that&#39;s what&#39;s causing a lot of people to jump on that quiet quitting bandwagon so if you were in their shoes not positioned for promotion not positioned for bonuses would you keep staying late would you keep picking up the extra shifts i don&#39;t know i don&#39;t know it&#39;s it&#39;s hard to say right okay so let&#39;s get to some more strategies here one is create a plan okay this one&#39;s one of those easier said than done it&#39;s it&#39;s gonna take time it is a pretty big one that we&#39;re gonna we&#39;re gonna tackle is create a plan for reducing unsustainable workloads okay we have to start giving our staff their lives back and really taking work-life balance seriously as best we can i know some of you are 365-day operations right where my senior care friends at senior living that in healthcare you&#39;re working all year long all day every day and so it is harder in that situation but it is not impossible and so we have to uh take a look at swinging the pendulum back and getting back to realistic these are the key words realistic and sustainable workloads for our people okay so on the last webinar last month we talked extensively about how the workloads got out of whack and also how to reduce the workloads what does that look like step-by-step kind of guidance on that okay so go check out that webinar if that&#39;s where you really need to put in the time and effort at your organization another thing that you can do that&#39;s really really helpful and also very eye-opening for the leadership team ensure that your job descriptions are up to date okay i&#39;m gonna let you think about that for a second ensure that your job descriptions are up to date do they have the realistic expectations in it of what a person&#39;s job load is going to look like and what their responsibilities are going to look like or have we continued to pile on and pie along now i know i&#39;m guilty of that i have several staff that i continue to say hey could you leave this project hey could you also do this every afternoon hey could you check on this quarterly right i continue to ask them to do things over and over but i am a manager who is hyper vigilant at maintaining good workloads and so i&#39;m constantly asking my team hey where&#39;s your capacity what&#39;s your workload look like uh how are things this week next week what&#39;s this month look like for you right so that we can prioritize things better we can move things to the back burner when needed right of course i want folks to get everything done that we&#39;ve talked about but it&#39;s just not possible without getting those workloads out of whack so we prioritize every week or every month or every quarter depending on the department and that way we&#39;re able to keep those in check okay so i&#39;m guilty of not always updating the job description but if my job description isn&#39;t up to date at least i&#39;m still checking in genuinely with my people about their workload and about that plate okay so check and see if your job descriptions truly are up to date and that could be a really great place to start also you need to review and possibly adjust or recalibrate my favorite word your metrics and goals because a lot of the metrics and goals that i see for organizations are based on pushing people too far and that&#39;s not sustainable so now when people swing that pendulum back and say nope i am not going to keep working this hard right or i&#39;m not going to keep taking on those extra shifts or whatnot then all of a sudden we start to miss the metrics we start to miss the goals and then the executives say oh this turnover&#39;s under out of control and you know we&#39;re under budget or under you know what i mean under on revenue we&#39;re we&#39;re in the red all these things they start to freak out because we&#39;re not hitting our metrics well it&#39;s because we were operating off of a business model that wasn&#39;t sustainable and so now we also need to talk with our teams discuss as leaders and certainly at the senior leadership team we have to say are the goals and metrics going into 2023 sustainable and even achievable are they realistic metrics or are we just honestly pushing our people away because we&#39;re pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing on them okay so that could be part of the reason for a lot of the turnover is that we&#39;ve set unrealistic expectations and workloads on those folks okay another tactic that you can implement is to evaluate and set new expectations around after hours communication okay that&#39;s been a big part of the quiet quitting discussions that i&#39;m seeing is people are saying okay i&#39;m gonna do my job i&#39;m gonna be a hard worker from nine to five eight to five whatever my shift is but i&#39;m no longer answering emails at night i can&#39;t do that it&#39;s too disruptive to my family my marriage is struggling because of you know this i&#39;m always on my phone or my spouse is always on their phone or whatnot it&#39;s just not worth it and i&#39;m not present at my kids games on saturday morning because my work expects me to respond things like that so that&#39;s another way that people are saying okay i&#39;m not in the office but i&#39;m i&#39;m actually going to cut off some of that after hours communication so one way to to really address this issue is to talk with your team about after hours communication now my team knows because i&#39;m explicit with them first things first i don&#39;t work a lot of nights and weekends but when i do let&#39;s say i&#39;m traveling okay i&#39;m traveling to keynote in in santa fe and i have the night at the hotel and i want to i choose to get caught up on some work and do some things well my team knows if they get an email from me on a wednesday night at 8pm they do not need to respond in fact i don&#39;t want them to respond until their next working hours in fact i&#39;ve tried to use uh i know google and outlook and other systems have have capabilities where you can actually set your email to go out the next morning because if people have notifications set up on their phone what happens at 8 pm when i send an email oh my gosh kara sent me an email i better read it and check it even though i&#39;ve told them they don&#39;t have to they&#39;re probably going to read it anyway and then it&#39;s going to take up mental space for them if it&#39;s a problem they have to solve or something else they have to do when they get to work tomorrow they&#39;re going to think about that so it&#39;s even better if i wait and send that email i have it automatically scheduled to send the next morning so that i&#39;m not disrupting their evening and making them feel like they don&#39;t have that work-life balance they want okay so you want to talk about after hours communication and this is also different depending on whether you have hourly workers or salary workers you may have to come at that a little bit differently but here&#39;s another thing i&#39;m hearing a lot about and that is the people that are on call okay so the people that are on call they have told me i feel like i&#39;m on call all the time i used to be the manager on duty one weekend a month or something like that where okay i was on call just at certain times of the month or one day a week or something like that and now they feel like they&#39;re just on call all the time well here&#39;s an interesting example that happened in one of my classes is there was a department head and he said how do i get the people at night to quit calling me they always call me to solve their problems can&#39;t they figure it out themselves why do they have to wake me up at two in the morning and i said okay well is it only night time that you&#39;re getting calls he goes oh yeah no second shift never calls me it&#39;s just third shift that calls me i said okay well why doesn&#39;t second shift call you to solve their problems he said oh well second shift has a supervisor oh you can imagine the look on his face when i just paused and i did what you know what is it the dog head tilt like right when i say do you want to go for a walk my dog goes i just looked at him and then he said oh i need a third shift supervisor he totally figured it out himself but he could not figure out until we had that conversation why he kept getting bothered in the middle of the night while the other shifts could take care of themselves right because he was typically first shift he had a second shift supervisor he had no supervisor so that&#39;s why he felt like he was on call every single night and yet he had somehow kind of done that to himself a little bit or the company had let him do that by not having the right structure in place to have a third shift supervisor okay so we have to make sure we got the right resources in place to keep us from being on call all the time and then there&#39;s another conversation maybe for another day about we also want to make sure that those who feel like they&#39;re on call all the time are not control freaks that have not empowered their team to make decisions without fear of retribution or getting in trouble for making the wrong decision and things like that so again that&#39;s a topic for another day but there are lots of reasons why some people feel that burden of being on call all the time and sometimes it&#39;s self-imposed and sometimes it&#39;s based on the company business model or structure okay so oh my goodness we covered so much stuff today so what is and is not quite quitting we talked about the cause of it and the phenomenon that took took off on social uh we talked about shifting our mindset around this issue as well as ways to address respond and even avoid the quiet quitting of our own team so as we wrap up um i would love for you to put your questions in the q a box i&#39;ve got time today to answer some of your questions and we&#39;ve already got a few that have come in here and so i&#39;m going to pass things back to jess while i take a look at these questions and she&#39;s going to tell you about our exciting new program that we are launching this fall i can&#39;t believe it so yeah go ahead jess awesome i love it all the information for a hashtag quiet quitting now you guys can help school other folks out there on social etc um but if you&#39;ve been following us for a while now i&#39;m sure you&#39;ve heard us say that training leaders is one of the best things you can do to retain their direct reports and even tr retain the leaders as well um it&#39;s the it&#39;s the fastest way to get the quickest results when it comes to retention and this is really true in a world of the quiet quitting as well good employees respond with loyalty and dedication they feel valued and invested in employees don&#39;t really quite quit when they&#39;re being developed and appreciated right so many of our clients know that training is the key to retention but as we have heard even before 2020 time is really such an obstacle for folks right now so if i get a hallelujah men or a big yes in all caps if uh in the chat if you&#39;d love to train your employees but time seems to really be working against you i&#39;ve got a couple coming in right now so we have listened to our clients in the market and we created a very unique special program that i&#39;m very proud about it trains leaders in a format that works with our busy schedules so we&#39;ve pieced together an engaging virtual training where participants there&#39;s about there&#39;s four components so first the participants will watch an on-demand 30-minute content video on that topic at their convenience whatever they&#39;d like they can watch it once twice washing dishes in the office during lunch etc and then they come together on a 90-minute facilitated discussion that dives into working through actual issues works on application and brainstorming together so that is a huge teamwork opportunity as well after that call participants in the program have a very specific tangible tasks and goals that they will complete on their own time within the next four weeks we also send out a really great challenge video to keep those strategies and that concept top of mind when we launched this program earlier this year one of our clients literally implemented and changed company policies after that session the team came up with that during that facilitated discussion as a way to retain and improve the culture within the organization so this has got some big sticking power the program is pieced together using those four parts in order to make the time to complete the training and not use the pushback that our clients are giving us of i just don&#39;t have time for this so you got those four components that are pieced together that you can work at on your own time except for that virtual facilitated discussion that&#39;s the big part so normally we offer this program for companies right we get a cohort together they send their entire team together as that group but this fall doing something really unique we are offering the same leadership essentials classes except as open training courses meaning yeah right confetti meaning you can send just one leader yourself your co-worker uh the person who&#39;s been begging for that opportunity of extra engagement or folks who maybe need that extra engagement as we&#39;ve talked about so one leader can be sent to that open enrollment course for 147. so if your company just didn&#39;t have the time perhaps to set up training for all leaders they didn&#39;t have the budget to send the leaders to a conference for example this is the time to purchase that single seat or a group of seats even for a group of leaders for 147 per individual so you&#39;ll go through that same program flow of the content again the video 90-minute facilitated discussion the action guide the challenge video it&#39;s just really great for small teams companies with a few new leaders uh companies that want to test out the program before you roll out something quarterly perhaps for the um whole company and this is the cool part that since you&#39;re on the webinar we are offering 50 off you just need to use the promo code webinar to redeem that that special fee so use the webinar uh code to get half off so for all my math geniuses 147 divided by two right so 75 bucks a person that&#39;s right which is huge right so the links to the three different classes are being thrown in the chat right now october&#39;s workshop is focusing on retention strategies november&#39;s workshop is on our generational dynamics within the workplace and bridging those gaps and then december is going to be improving leadership communication you can email ask at magnetculture.com if you have any questions about this program and then carol we do have a couple questions rolling in so let&#39;s answer some of these guys as time permits yeah absolutely um and just real quick to reiterate i just heard over and over you all people said we can&#39;t do half day training anymore we can&#39;t do full day training anymore 90 minutes that&#39;s all we have available for you can you come in and do 90 minutes well it is tough to change behavior in 90 minutes and so that&#39;s why we created this 90-minute live session coupled with that 30-minute content video with the four week action guide that changes behavior afterwards and that puts it into the busy lives of our managers schedule okay we can still fit it into their their schedule and and it&#39;s getting rave reviews this year from the groups that have already rolled out the program internally so yeah give us a call but hopefully you guys can send some folks in october november december to those classes as well so we&#39;re excited because some of our clients are just too small or not ready or don&#39;t have the budget to bring the training program in house just yet and this is a great way to get started doing that this fall so can&#39;t wait to see you guys all right so here&#39;s some questions one is as someone in hr for a company right how many of you are in hr woohoo how do we educate and influence the executives and owners on this new phenomenon when they&#39;re living and breathing the hustle culture okay so my first answer is send them this webinar recording and last month&#39;s webinar recording where we explained how this happened and you know the fact that is truly not sustainable i would say last month&#39;s webinar was even more geared toward executives and even if you can&#39;t get them to watch the videos or whatnot the key phrase is sustainability sustainability okay we&#39;re not talking about recycling kind of sustainability we&#39;re talking about sustainability of the organization will your organization be here in five years if you do not change this if you continue to work hustle hustle hustle hustle and expect expect expect and push push push push if you continue to do that as the workforce continues to evolve and shift their expectations and demands will your company be able to operate moving forward so that to me is the conversation we have to have and if you&#39;re in hr some of you already do this very well some hr friends of mine do not or they&#39;re not comfortable with it but you have to speak the numbers the cost of turnover the operational language about either deficiencies or mistakes or errors or missing client deadlines right whether it&#39;s services you provide or goods that you provide or care that you provide how are how are we missing the mark on the operations side because we have so many new folks coming in um are we not delivering at the highest level of quality possible so we talk about those metrics talk about high level of quality talk about the mistakes and the errors and the deficiencies and and missed deadlines and things like that the impact to operations and finance so know the cost of turnover know the cost of those mistakes know the cost of the um the new hire that is not up to speed yet and so they&#39;re only half productive for us if you know those costs and the operational impact of having so much turnover or having people that are burning out and things like that that&#39;s how we get the executive&#39;s attention and start to get the resources and priorities set that we need set for that okay so hopefully that answered your question and helped you with that uh gave you some ammo for those conversations but definitely you all that&#39;s why we share or i&#39;m sorry we record these webinars is so that you can share it out with your team maybe even have a lunch watch party and say y&#39;all we have to talk about this this is not easy to hear but we need to talk about this so let&#39;s listen and then have a candid conversation about our sustainability moving forward okay so that&#39;s a great way to address it as well another question came in oh so somebody asked about quiet firing which has also been a hashtag it&#39;s actually not at all related to quiet quitting directly but um it is another phenomenon people are talking about and quiet firing is more so when an organization wants someone to leave and so they make the job not pleasant for them so let&#39;s say um this happened to me this is another thing it&#39;s been around forever this happened to me in college i worked at a mall at a retail shop during college in the summertime i had told the manager i needed 28 hours a week to pay my bills and things like that so i needed at least 28 hours a week they said that&#39;s fine when they hired me then a few months in they got a new manager the new manager did not care for me so he put me on his first schedule at 10 hours a week and i went to him and i said whoa hey i need 28 plus to stay working here and he said well sorry i only have 10. i said okay well next week if you could get me back to 28 that&#39;d be really great the next schedule comes out 10 hours so he didn&#39;t want to fire me he wanted me to quit so what he did is he made the situation unpleasant for me and he kept cutting my hours so we see this happen all the time it is a way for employers to avoid difficult conversations it is a way for them to avoid potential wrongful hiring disputes because they get the person to quit so sometimes people are doing the quiet firing by either overloading a person or underloading in my case where they didn&#39;t give me enough hours to work sometimes they purposefully give folks work they don&#39;t want to do and that is a way to push them away or they&#39;ll purposefully put them on a team with somebody they don&#39;t like or supervisor that they don&#39;t get along with or something like that so yeah that quiet firing is a thing as well if you hear that but it&#39;s very different than the quiet quitting side of things and it&#39;s more of a way to get people to quit without having to fire them i&#39;m not a big fan of that i don&#39;t think it&#39;s i don&#39;t think it&#39;s the right thing to do in most cases but it certainly happens every day and has been happening in a lot of cases for years so all right well i think we are going to wrap it up right there so thank you all so much for your time and attention today i know you&#39;re busy so i hope that this webinar has been helpful in understanding this quiet quitting phenomenon and giving you yet again some more retention strategies for creating a better place to work creating better leaders on your team and for keeping the talent you cannot afford to lose so follow us on youtube at youtube.com magnetculture to make sure that you get the recordings as soon as they pop up of all of these free webinars and other programs from the stage so have a wonderful day everybody thank you so much for everything you do we&#39;ll see you later bye

Transcript for:Understanding the Quiet Quitting Phenomenon

Transcript for:
Understanding the Quiet Quitting Phenomenon