Just last week, my colleague Bryan Wroten opined on the rise of the term "quiet quitting" to describe the employee behavior of doing their assigned work and nothing more.
He cataloged a lot of reasons there is nothing wrong with hotel employees working to task isn't a necessarily a bad thing, so I'll avoid getting into that again. But I do think it's worth stressing once again how inherently selfish some of the complaining about it is.
To state it plainly, if you're a manager and you vilify your employees for prioritizing their own lives ahead of maximizing their productivity for you, it's not the employee that's the problem.
As the old adage goes, employees don't quiet quit companies, they quiet quit bad managers.
Like in all aspects of life, respect is a two-way street, so if you show through both words and actions that you value and respect your employees time and effort, they are more likely to value the overall business and look for ways beyond their assign tasks or job description where they can contribute to its health.
I don't necessarily blame all managers and owners for this perspective, but it's something good managers will put effort into getting past. You may be completely steeped in thinking about what's best for the overall business because that is directly tied to your own financial well-being. But if you don't give individual employees compelling reasons to have that same connection, you're relationship will be purely transactional.
So if you want to get more than the bare minimum from your employees, you've got to give them more than the bare minimum. If you're not flexible with their schedules, why should they be flexible with theirs? If you can't shift your expectations based on their day-to-day needs, why should they adapt as the needs of your business change?
Now this isn't to say there aren't and won't be business-employee relationships that simply won't work. There are plenty of bad actors in the world that are on both sides of the equation.
But recognizing that not everyone is bad or trying to take advantage of others, the salve for this situation is something remarkably simple: empathy.
If you as a manager can recognize that employees are more than just cogs in the machine, that they are living, breathing humans with thoughts, feelings and needs that extend well beyond the workplace, it's much easier to work through things before they get to the point where they're subtly throwing in the towel. The employee that thinks you care about them is much more likely to care about you.
Put yourself in their shoes. If you told a boss that you have a family issue that requires some sort of schedule flexibility, and that boss simply said that's your own problem to fix and they don't want to deal with it or give you any allowances, how likely are you to bend over backwards for them when they say they need more of your time and effort? Is that quiet quitting or is that The Golden Rule?
In the end, this is nothing new. Bad managers have always been quick to point fingers at everyone but themselves to avoid the type of introspection that would reveal they are in fact the problem. But having that moment of truth is the first step in finding the real solution.
So if you're someone who constantly has employees unwilling to give more than the absolute minimum, take a moment and ask yourself why that might be and what are you doing — or perhaps more importantly what are you not doing — to inspire so little faith and loyalty. Maybe you're just "quiet quitting" on your people.
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