By Robert Christiansen Founder & CEO, Motive for Life and The Durable Innovator
If you’ve read a few of the hundreds of recent articles on quiet quitting, you probably think you have a pretty good idea of what’s driving this mass worker disengagement. The truth is, most of those assumptions and understandings don’t get to the root cause of the problem.
Julia is a bright engineer I met five years ago. After receiving a master’s degree in electrical engineering, she took a well-paying position with a firm managing mobile carrier sites. She put her head down and did the assigned work, hoping more creative, engaging opportunities would appear. Week after week, month after month, Julia wondered if the tasks would get more interesting. She struggled with her career choice and whether she made the right decision to be an electrical engineer.
Finally, she’d had enough of the mundane, institutional gray work her boss continued to assign. She looked at her work environment and said, “I’m out.” In Julia’s case, the decision was literal: She resigned and took a much lower-paying job as a barista, having saved up enough cash to weather the income hit.
However, most employees aren’t in that position. They’re just as fed up, but they have bills, mortgages and student loans to pay. They can’t afford to leave their current position for less money. These employees don’t offer their resignation. They don’t leave the building. They’re still present on the Zoom calls—and, most importantly, the payroll. They never actually leave and, yet, it is almost as if they don’t exist.
They are the “quiet quitters” that have been the subject of endless recent think pieces and who, according to Gallup’s 2022 State of the Global Workplace report, make up as much as 50 percent of the workforce.1
All those articles on quiet quitting that are circulating often refer to egregious violations of basic “Management 101” principles as the reason for this zombie-like effect. They may cite examples like forcing their teams to work late nights and weekends or not recognizing a job well done.
These principles are essential, of course, but not sufficient to understand the situation. So let’s set aside matters of basic leadership for once and focus on the biggest root cause of the problem—simply put, it is the nature of the work that creates this dissonance. The nascent Julias in your organization are looking for something you are not providing—and it’s not more money, praise or PTO.
Leadership today has no choice but to wake up to the real issue: The quality of the work that we are assigning to our team members is draining away their attention, interest and energy—creating legions of zombies who go through the motions in their daily tasks and get just enough done to fly under the radar.
Imagine for a moment—you’re sitting at a large table, and on it is a huge pile of shoes. Each shoelace has a knot that you are assigned to untangle. Each time you free a shoelace from its dilemma, your manager unloads another pile of mangled shoes with tangled shoelaces. Now imagine this replays over and over again. How long could you endure the monotony and frustration before checking out—regardless of how much you were being paid? Why would a highly educated person with in-demand skills, like Julia, take a minimum-wage job? Her short answer when I asked was, “Because the work sucked.” Put another way, she was being tasked with untying knots.
Stop and think. Metaphorically speaking, are you asking your employees to detangle shoelaces with complicated knots? Consider two really important questions: 1) Are you asking your employees to do tedious work that should be automated by deploying modern technologies? 2) Does the work they are doing help differentiate the business, and if so, do they understand how? If you don’t like the answers to these questions, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are not getting the productivity you expect.
The research is clear, the nature of the work matters—and it matters for everyone, regardless of generation. The graphic on the left, based on research from 1990, but just as relevant today, illustrates that the higher the complexity of work the more flow matters. We’ll get to the concept of flow in a bit, but here I contend that what was originally identified as “complexity of work” is a proxy for “interesting and impactful work”—something employees can feel good about. Distraction occurs anytime the nature of the work becomes tedious and uninteresting, and the cost of this distraction is far more burdensome than you may realize.
According to the Gallup report mentioned previously, employee engagement is at a depressingly low 21 percent. Of the remaining disengaged balance, 60 percent are emotionally detached at work and 19 percent are miserable. Businesses pay a high price for this detachment and misery. Gallup estimates employee disengagement costs $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, globally.
Despite the mainstream line that this is exclusively part and parcel of the current zeitgeist, what we’re calling “quiet quitting” is not a new problem, nor is it unique to the younger faction of today’s workforce. Prior generations almost certainly experienced professional dissatisfaction and its psychological and emotional impacts. A trip back to high school psychology class and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs summarizes the phenomenon (see graphic on the right). The need to derive meaning and satisfaction from one’s daily work is driven by human nature, not generational status.
What is unique about today is the options employees have. In the longstanding old-world order, when jobs were few and employers and leadership had all the leverage, appearing overtly less-than-enthusiastic about work was risky business. But a still-strong labor market combined with the rise of the gig economy means today’s workers have alternatives previous generations simply didn’t.
Even when employees aren’t in an immediate position to explore those options, knowing they’re available changes a person’s perspective. Disengaging from a job that isn’t delivering on your psychological and self-fulfillment needs (e.g. logging off and doing the bare minimum) seems less fraught with risk when the ultimate potential consequence— being fired—is both unlikely and pretty easily remedied.
As Maslow teaches us, once we get past our basic needs of safety and survival, we all want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to feel we are making a real difference— in our organization, for our clients and customers, and in the wider world.
If you’re a Michael Jordan fan, you probably remember him talking about “being in the zone”—a Zen-like state in which he achieved a higher level of performance. In its well-known study of worker productivity, Forrester identified a similar state achieved among organizational teams—what it refers to as “the flow.”2
On a basketball court, flow looks like effortlessly knocking down shot after shot—nothing but net all game, executed with both intensity and calm. According to Forrester, in a corporate context, it might look like this: You glance at the clock, astonished to discover that it reads 10:30 p.m. You can’t remember anything around you between now and the last time you looked at it, around 6:30—about the time the last of your noisy officemates left for home—but you feel strangely satisfied and happy. You haven’t had dinner, and you can’t remember if you called your spouse to let them know you’d be late. Instead, your brain feels almost sparkly as you recall the moments of discovery and progress you made tonight. You savor the joy of having solved the hard problems that have been vexing your team for weeks. You are happy, you love your work in this moment, and you look forward to doing it all over again. What you may not realize is that you now know what flow feels like. If only all your coworkers could feel this all day long, they’d be much more productive. Is that possible?
The short answer is yes. Once anyone enters the flow, it is almost impossible to withdraw from the work—regardless of what management says (or doesn’t say). And, back to Maslow, everyone wants to be in the flow. It’s the manifestation of all those top-level needs being lit up like a pinball machine.
Identifying and providing work that fulfills their team members’ higher-level needs and enables a flow state for them is the job of leadership. That requires removing from their plates work that doesn’t achieve that end. The work may be essential to effective daily operations and must still be done and done well—those pesky knots still need to be untied if your business is going to run! But if the work is not a core differentiator, if it isn’t directly relatable to your mission and institutional “why,” then your team shouldn’t be doing it.
Given the high cost of distraction, you have a choice between automating everything that can be automated (i.e., digital transformation) or finding a service provider whose business is defined by doing this work. The best answer is to do both. Nobody should deny the exponential power that technologies deliver through automation, but it takes real expertise as well as a highly agile operating model and culture to get the most from your digital experiences.
In a separate Forrester study of IT executives3, most agreed that focusing on that which differentiates your business and finding an ally to handle the work that might be essential but does not truly differentiate you is highly effective:
95% agree or strongly agree that by engaging with an MSP their business can take advantage of more growth opportunities.
80% agree or strongly agree that their business has grown at a higher rate since engaging with an MSP.
74% of IT executives plan to or are already engaged with an MSP to counter the impact of the Great Resignation.
And, perhaps most importantly, an overwhelming number of anecdotes suggest that leveraging the right ally provides more time to “Be creative (and stay in the flow).”
After three months in the barista job, Julia took a role at another service company. She asked questions during the interview about roles, duties and how assignments are made, and went with a company that put her desires and needs first. Today, she’s doing challenging work she loves and feels reinvigorated, heard and validated. Her previous company could have provided her with all of this while she was still with them and kept a fantastic employee who would have been an asset to their business for years.
Don’t make the same mistake with the Julias in your organization, who today are quietly being drained of their professional enthusiasm, pride and joy. They’re not waiting for a bigger paycheck or more vacation days. They’re waiting for more stimulating and challenging work that supports their identity, connects to a larger purpose, aligns with what they’re great at, and provides a path for them to become even better.
Focus on providing your people with the work they find the most rewarding and engaging and let others untie the knots of the mundane tasks that, while essential, don’t challenge or stimulate them. Then, sit back and watch your zombie workforce surge back to life! \\
1 Jim Harter, “Is Quiet Quitting Real?” Gallup.com, September 2022.
2 “Engineer Your Technology Environment To Improve Productivity and Flow,” Forrester Research, Inc., 2017.
3 “The Total Economic Impact™ of Ensono IT Infrastructure Management Services: Cost Savings and Business Benefits Enabled by Ensono IT Infrastructure Management Services,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Ensono, August 2022.
