Employee Survival Guide® - How Managers Can Help Quiet Quitters

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, it's Mark here, and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does definitely not want you to know about, and a lot more. Today's episode, we're going to talk about how managers can help quiet quitters. That's a good topic. quiet quitters. That's a good topic. We are now awash in articles about quiet quitting, and there are no solutions being offered to abate the problem. I wrote an article on September 13, 2022, entitled The Causes of Quiet Quitting and a Radical Solution. In the article, I place the blame, as I always do, on employers. Based on decades of poor management practices that are out of sync

Starting point is 00:00:46 with the vast majority of workers. In this article, I will offer a few simple yet concise considerations to aid managers, because they're employees too, to help all employers, employees, not just quiet quitters. The reasoning behind these solutions will be self-evident. Managers are now experiencing an existential work conflict from outside social media to within front lines of their subordinates. Managers wonder whether quiet quitting is even real. They wonder how to fire the alleged slackers, how to manage and motivate current employees, and how to manage the situation for the betterment of the company. I write to all current managers and say, I have your back here, and I'll now provide solutions below.

Starting point is 00:01:28 As managers, you enforce the policies and procedures handed down from the high castle, the C-suite. Yet you are powerless to effect real change. I say this because the executive management team really controls the shots when it comes to culture and work life within the organization. Managers will need to work up the chain of command to gain authorization about implementing change strategies to keep employees engaged, which is nearly impossible in many medium to

Starting point is 00:01:56 large corporations. Here's my first solution. Avoid toxic work environments. The most common complaint I hear from employees is about managers who raise their voices and even yell at employees during work meetings. No one likes to be yelled at, period. In my opinion, yelling is merely the exhibition of a poorly performing manager who reverts to the idiocy of screaming at employees to make them conform. Other forms of toxicity can range from overworking employees beyond reason, failing to pay overtime due to illegal wage classifications. We call this the exempt and non-exempt wage issue. Discrimination and retaliation. Boy, those are large categories, but they tend to just ruin cultures. Employee favoritism and

Starting point is 00:02:43 fiefdoms. My favorite, because we know they exist, and too many lengthy meetings that go nowhere. Managers who wish to be effective leaders must listen more and demand less. The Drucker Institute and Korn Ferry produced a report found that most effective managers are those who exhibited the following characteristics and competencies. Here's the first one. Tolerance of ambiguity. Second, trust. What a novel idea, trust. Curiosity. Next one is risk-taking. Adaptability. Having a global perspective. Having a global perspective. Managing ambiguity. Interpersonal savvy.

Starting point is 00:03:27 Collaboration. And then finally, instilling trust. Trust in employees. I encourage you to read the article in the Wall Street Journal where this information was reported. And you can follow the link on the article in the blog article we have. And ask yourself, if you currently exhibit these traits and competencies as a leader, as a manager, it is obvious that the pandemic and after effect has caused many managers in the top corporations to eagerly heed the issues, concerns, and desires of employees. The theory exposes as follows. If you have some or all of the traits and competencies mentioned in

Starting point is 00:04:05 the Korn Ferry report, then your company will be highly successful and your employees will be highly engaged. Sounds good, right? Well, it's harder than you think. People are people. They can't stop themselves from behaving like people. Here's the next solution. Transparent communications. Communicate with employees in a transparent manner as if you were speaking to your own family member or spouse. Good family relationships require open and honest communication. That makes sense, of course. You should assess your communication style as a manager and see if you can listen more to what employees have to say to help them. Rewards are always given to managers who listen, and penalties assessed to those who

Starting point is 00:04:45 do not. I recently found the following article from the Harvard Business Review fascinating. It is entitled, The Transparency Trap. Again, there's a link in our blog article about this, you can find it. The gist of the article is this, quote, here's the paradox. For all that transparency does to drive out wasteful practices and promote collaboration and shared learning, too much of it can trigger distortions of fact and counterproductive inhibitions. Unrehearsed, experimental behaviors sometimes cease altogether. Wide open workspaces and copious real-time data on how individuals spend their time can leave employees feeling exposed and vulnerable. Being observed changes their conduct. They start going to great lengths to keep what they are doing

Starting point is 00:05:31 under wraps, even if they had nothing bad to hide. If executives pick up on signs of covert activity, they instinctively start to monitor employees' behavior even more intensely. And that just aggravates the problem. End quote. Here's the next solution. Avoid the dictator mentality. Many managers ascend to the throne without any training about how to become a good and effective manager. Managers just somehow learn the skills by trial and error and more error. Well, that's fine as if you're a successful entrepreneur because I learned by mistakes. But many managers never learn how to be effective leaders because the executive team never spends the time and the resources to develop the relevant traits and competencies discussed in the Drucker Institute Corn Fairy Report.

Starting point is 00:06:20 So avoid the dictator mentality. And you know whom I'm referring to, and we all have had coworkers who fall into this lot. No one likes a dictator because dictators do not spend the time and energy to listen. They just bark orders, hide behind their insane narcissistic egos, and so on. Dictators also brown nose up the executive management team and run cover to protect themselves, all the while harming the company by ruining work culture all around them. Here's the next solution. Think about doing less than more. Yeah, I said it. Think about doing less than more. Managers may want to consider re-evaluating how much work they are expecting employees to complete and providing less work.

Starting point is 00:07:04 On September 25 25, 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported in a story entitled, Why Bosses Should Ask Employees to Do Less, Not More. The article is quoted as saying, it isn't that addition is inherently bad, but when leaders are undisciplined about piling on staff, gizmos, software, meetings, rules, For so many companies, the opposite less, less, less is the key to success. Subtraction clears our minds and gives us the time to focus on what really counts. It sets the stage for creative work, giving us the space to fail, fret, discuss, argue about, and experiment with seemingly crazy ideas. The ideas that can transform a company and make employees happier and more productive. The idea is that by eliminating things that are unnecessarily burdensome,

Starting point is 00:08:07 such as filling out expense reports, meetings that are too long, and all that other stuff that saps too much time and emotional energy, it leaves more time and will to do things that are time-consuming and frustrating, the stuff that innovation emerges from. End quote. I thought the article was really good. I think you should really take an examination of what that article is talking about, because that may be the quintessential solution to quiet quitters, because we are expecting our

Starting point is 00:08:39 employees to just grind it out beyond 40 hours, sometimes not paying for those 40 hours and above for overtime, and just expecting more, more, and more, and more, just like the internet just produces more, more, more, and it's causing a problem. And I think what everyone has to realize, it's just not, they're slackers, they're not lazy, they're not anything. They're just saying, we don't like your work culture. And what's so amazing about this phenomenon, if you want to call it, is that this is coming from a 30-something or younger population. And the 30-something and younger populations are going to be followed by another population of younger employees, and they're going to get wind of this. And they're going to say, well, I don't like that

Starting point is 00:09:22 grind mentality either. Live to work, work to live, whatever you want to call it. So we're getting all this social response and objections by the employees themselves popping up through the media. It's amazing. And corporations are taking notice. And we all should take notice. Because maybe, just maybe, all that time spent in the last three years of flexibility of work life, doing and controlling your own schedule, maybe that just hit the nerve for most folks. Whether they're returning back to the office or not, they're still going to remember that and they're going to fight for that change. So maybe doing less is appropriate. Counterintuitive to many managers because they don't understand squat about how to run an organization because they've never been trained to do it.

Starting point is 00:10:11 And maybe less is better. Maybe less is better for the company financially. Maybe less is better for employees and allows them to make more money because they're going to come up with great ideas. But we've got to try it. We just can't continue to expect employees to hit on a train, come and show up at nine, leave at five, and sometimes later, and do it day in, day out, and just, you know, rinse and repeat. Something is broken. Employees are saying, we got the fix. This article I read about the Wall Street Journal regarding doing less, not more. And the solutions I gave you in this podcast, in our blog article, in our previous article as well. It's a start. And we need to really move forward instead of going back

Starting point is 00:10:57 to the same old, same old that, you know, a lot of companies and management want us to go back to because it's easier. It's much easier to police, to manage it, to discipline it, whatever, with a dictator type of behavior. It doesn't work anymore. And companies are starting to realize that. Slow, but they're realizing it. So if you're listening out there, managers and your executive C-suite people, the shit's got to stop. Point blank. I don't really care anymore.

Starting point is 00:11:28 And these employees don't either. So you want to continue making mistakes? I'll continue to watch. I'll continue to litigate against you. But things are changing. And if you don't change with it, you might go under. With that note, have a great week, and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 00:11:45 And as always, if you like the podcast, leave us a review. We enjoy that and I'll talk to you soon.

Employee Survival Guide® - How Managers Can Help Quiet Quitters

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