How leaders address quiet quitting can make or break workplace culture

Everybody, everywhere has been talking about quiet quitting - the latest workplace trend referring to employees who no longer go above and beyond. As a leadership coach and organizational change practitioner, I naturally have a lot of thoughts on this 🙃

Understanding the many faces of quiet quitting

While some executives have referred to quiet quitting as employee complacency and laziness, these are incomplete narratives that gloss over the problem. Similar to the Great Resignation, quiet quitting is about employees choosing to no longer tolerate the status quo.

Quiet quitting is a result of employees reprioritizing what’s important to them - like mental health, family, relationships, and self-love - and setting the boundaries to protect those priorities. Rather than condemn employees who have chosen to quiet quit, we need to be curious about what’s influencing these decisions. For example, how might organizational culture, leadership support, and diversity, equity and inclusion contribute to these decisions? Who are the quiet quitters? Are they high performers who were continuously passed up for that promotion or raise? Or women who took on so much emotional labour at work that they burned out? Or racialized folks who dealt with continued microaggressions and didn’t receive the leadership support to address it? Or working parents who were forced to return to the office because their executives didn’t trust that they were productive enough at home?

Leading with curiosity to develop engaged teams

Approaching quiet quitting with curiosity can help leaders understand the underlying challenges that are influencing people’s decisions to set up these new boundaries.

Without this curiosity, leaders may tell themselves that their employees are lazy and entitled and respond to quiet quitting with fear or anger. This may lead to reactive decisions like pushing out all the quiet quitters or introducing AI technology to monitor employee productivity. These actions will likely further damage trust, hurt team morale, and lead to increased disengagement and turnover across the organization.

Leaders who approach quiet quitting with curiosity are more open to acknowledging a shift in what employees value. They are more likely to see this as an opportunity to explore new ways to lead engaged teams. Leading with curiosity helps leaders build a genuine desire to understand what their team members individually need and want to do their best work.

Adapting to changing employee expectations

The world has evolved dramatically over the past 2+ years. The pandemic has caused a level of collective trauma that we’ve never experienced before. Chronic stress and burnout in the workplace has increased across industries. Public discourse about systemic oppression has heightened. Employee engagement has seen a steady decline. Despite all of these major societal changes, many organizations have continued to maintain the status quo.

Organizations must adapt their workplace culture to the evolving needs and expectations of their people or else they will fall behind. As a starting point, leaders can cultivate organizational resilience by approaching workplace trends like quiet quitting and the Great Resignation with curiosity.

Leading with curiosity is a necessary muscle that organizations need to build get ahead of the next workplace trend - whenever and whatever it may be.