The Cure For ‘Quiet Quitting’
“I have people who report to me. I work for them, they don't work for me. It's not their job to make me successful. It's actually my job to make them successful.”
—Michael Dandorph, Tufts Medicine President and CEO
The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting – call it what you want, but if people are leaving your workplace, or staying but choosing to hold themselves back, that’s on you as their leader.
The term “the great resignation” has been around a few years, but “quiet quitting” appeared recently and is suddenly everywhere. It has been described as quitting the idea of going above and beyond: staying in a current job, but stopping the frenetic over-servicing of that job. Some people see it as lazy; others see it as a natural response to having been asked to do more and more over the years for less and less.
How you view that trend reveals a lot about the kind of leader you are. If your instinct is to think these so-called quiet quitters are being lazy, you’re missing the point – and missing an opportunity to improve yourself as a leader and your organization as a place to work.
Quiet quitters are not lazy, they’re burned out.
There are reasons for burn-out that should be immediately obvious: pandemic, social unrest, unpredictable economy.
But there are also reasons that originated well before the chaos of the past few years. People are tired of being stifled by leaders who don’t trust or value them. If there’s no freedom to take a risk without fear of being punished for a bad result, then why take a risk? If there’s no acknowledgement of their capacity and no opportunity to contribute their full value, then why would they want to do more?
But, here’s your opportunity: if they do see evidence that it’s not only safe but also beneficial to try, to risk, to experiment, to achieve at their fullest capacity, they will. They’re eager to.
According to the 2022 Career Optimism Index from the University of Phoenix: even though people are still stressed and financially strapped after two years of the pandemic, they remain optimistic and hopeful about the future of their careers. Nearly one in three Americans would quit their current job without having another one lined up—but 69% said they would consider staying at their current job if things changed.
But what needs to change?
People want a chance to show you what they can do. They want to stretch themselves. They have experience and insight, they want to do more. But they don’t see those opportunities in their jobs today. What would need to change in your organization for people to not only stay, but contribute at their fullest capacity?
I interviewed Michael Dandorph, Tufts Medicine President and CEO, for the Personalization Outbreak Podcast. The quotes that appear in this article were taken from that episode.
I asked him how we begin to not only respect individuals where they're at, but also to give them room to refresh.
He said we need to return to the original meaning of “lean.”
“There’s an important philosophical distinction around the way that I think about leadership and the way that I ask our senior team to think about leadership,” said Dandorph. “I go back to the philosophy of lean, which I think many people get wrong. They think about lean as a way to reduce costs or drive efficiencies. But if you go back to the originating philosophy of lean, when Toyota developed it, it was all about designing work with respect for people at its core.”
So, how do you turn a concept like “respect” into something tangible? It starts with a mindset of curiosity about what would actually help people do their best work. And when people are so burned out, a good place to start is to acknowledge their reality and change things to make it better.
“We’re organizing things in a way that makes it easier for people to get their work done, where they feel more supported,” said Dandorph. “This gives us an opportunity to rethink and change some policies and procedures.”
Here are three steps they’ve taken along that path.
1) Acknowledge the challenges of the past few years. There are legitimate reasons people are burned out, even if they’ve been getting nothing but support from you and the organization.
“The healthcare workforce, particularly the frontline staff, have gone through the most challenging experiences of their entire careers,” said Dandorph. “There is a lot of stress and burnout. How can we transform the work in a way that takes some of the learnings during the pandemic and uses those as opportunities instead of just thinking of those as challenges?”
2) Write new rules. Examine official policies and also unofficial expectations about how people work, when they’re expected to be available and what they’re expected to accomplish. Make sure everyone who leads people is on board – you might have an official policy that says people don’t have to respond to email after hours, but if an individual leader favors employees who are available at all hours over those who are not, your policy won’t be effective.
“We needed to redefine some of the rules of work, and put some parameters around it so that people can have time to decompress,” said Dandorph. “Are we asking people to be ready to answer emails 24/7? Or are we going to have quiet periods where we expect people to wait until the next day? We're in healthcare and healthcare is 24/7. So, some people need to be on call. But that doesn't mean that you have to be available constantly. We ask people to use their vacation time, and to make sure that they're separating when they go on vacation – not checking emails every day. We want them to be able to replenish themselves.”
3) Pay attention to every level. It would be easy to focus on those who are on the front lines, whatever your industry. But everyone, at every level, has been affected and has been stressed.
“Our caregivers are incredibly important, but everybody's part of the team and everybody's supporting them in a way,” said Dandorph. “The wellbeing of everybody is important. As a senior team, we want to emphasize the importance of wellbeing and individual wellness in making people feel valued and supported.”
As Dandorph and his senior team considered how to support their workforce, they landed on a phrase that helped them establish their mindset: “One of our executives came up with the phrase, ‘we need to humanize work.’”
Humanize Work
This is a phrase that flips the script and puts the responsibility in the right place: with leaders.
Rather than thinking of burned-out people as “quiet quitters” who are somehow cheating you out of their fullest capacity for productivity, consider that you might be cheating them out of a healthy, human-centered work environment.
Let’s return to Dandorph’s quote at the top of this article: “I have people who report to me. I work for them, they don't work for me. It's not their job to make me successful. It's actually my job to make them successful.”
Dandorph extended that idea further, giving us a way to scale that type of leadership throughout the organization: “And if my direct reports do that for the people who report to them, and that goes all the way to the frontline, that philosophy carries all the way through to the consumer.”
Almost everyone is holding something back:
- A good idea
- A new method
- An informed opinion
- The full extent of their abilities
Our reasons for holding back might be sound. Most often it’s because we’ve been stifled by the status quo. But in a world where new technologies and business models can make our own products and services obsolete before we see what’s coming, we can’t afford to have organizations filled with people whose individual capacities are stifled in any way.
To learn more about how to humanize work, register free for the virtual version of the 2022 Leadership in the Age of Personalization Summit hosted by Clemson University’s Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business on October 14.
