How Managers Can Help Quiet Quitters

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 gonna talk about How Managers Can Help Quiet Quitters. It'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 in September 13 2022, entitled, The causes of quiet quitting, and a radical solution. In the article I placed the blame, as I always do on employers, based on decades of poor management practices that are out of sync 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 to 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 ledge 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 will now provide solutions below. As managers you enforce the policies and procedures handed down from the High Castle, the C suite, yet you are powerless to affect 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 without about implementing change strategies to keep employees engaged, which is nearly impossible in many medium to 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 are those are large categories, but they tend to just ruin cultures. Employee favoritism and fiefdoms my favorite because we know they exist in too many lengthy meetings that go nowhere. Managers who wish to be effective leaders must listen more in demand. Bless the Drucker Institute, and Korn Ferry, produce 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, a novel idea trust, curiosity. Next one is risk taking, adaptability, having a global perspective, managing ambiguity, interpersonal savvy, 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 an 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 espouse is as follows. If you have some or all the traits and competencies mentioned in 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 that 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 styles 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 do not. I recently found the following article from the Harvard Business Review fascinating 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 a pair docs. 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 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, and 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. Manager says just somehow learn the skills by trial and error and more error. Well, that's fine is as if you're a successful entrepreneur, because I learned by mistakes. But many managers never learned 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 Korn Ferry report. So avoid the dictator mentality, and you know, whom I'm referring to. And we all have had co workers 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 covered to protect themselves all the while harming the company by ruining work cultural all around them. Here's the next solution. Think about doing less than more. Yeah, I said 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. A summer 25th 2022 The Wall Street Journal reported in a story entitled Why bosses should ask employees to do less, not more 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, training and management fads, organizations become too complicated. Their people get overwhelmed and exhausted, and their resources are spread too thin, that all their work suffers. For so many companies, the opposite, less, less. Less is the key to success, make employees happier and more productive. The idea is that by eliminating things that are unnecessarily burdensome, 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 in will to do things that are time consuming and frustrating. The stuff that innovation emerges from and quote, I thought the article was really good, I thought, I think you should really take an examination of what that article is talking about. Because that may be the quintessential solution to quit quitters, because we are expecting our 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 and more more. And it's causing a problem. And I think what everyone has to realize, that'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 in younger populations is going to be followed by a another population of younger employees. And they're gonna get wind of this. And they're gonna say, Well, I don't like that grind mentality, either live to work, work to live, whatever you want to call. So we're getting all this social response in object objections by the employees themselves, popping up through the media. It's amazing. And incorporations are taking notice. And we also take notice, because maybe just maybe, all that time spent the last three years of flexibility of work life doing in 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're never been trained to do it. 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 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 to 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 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. Okay, it doesn't work anymore. And companies are starting to realize that flow, but they're realizing it. So if you're listening out there managers and your executive C suite people, the shit's got a stop. Point blank. I don't really care anymore. 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, he might go under with that note. Have a great week, and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening. And as always, if you liked the podcast, leave us a review. We enjoy that and I'll talk to you soon.