How to prevent “Quiet Quitting” and increase your team’s engagement.
“Quiet Quitting” is a catchy new term that describes what we’ve always called ‘disengagement’.
Good leaders can do a lot to prevent “Quiet Quitting”.
Here’s how.
Understand and Leverage the WIIFM (What’s in It for Me) for your employees.
As a leader, you shouldn’t take it for granted that all of your employees have intrinsic motivation to go above and beyond their job descriptions.
Research from Gallup, since 2000, shows that only about a third of workers are “Actively Engaged.” The rest are “Not Engaged,” meaning they are “psychologically unattached to their work or company” or “Actively Disengaged,” meaning “they are resentful their needs aren’t being met and are acting out their unhappiness.”
Take a moment to list all of your employees on a sheet of paper. Next to each employee, write whether you think they are currently Actively Engaged, Not Engaged, or Actively Disengaged?
It’s possible to increase their engagement by understanding what they want. Each employee is different, but here are some potential motivators:
Fair reward for their efforts
Connection to a bigger purpose
The opportunity to have a meaningful impact
Connection and camaraderie with teammates
Opportunities for career development and growth
Autonomy in their work
Time outside of work to have a ‘life’
For each of your employees, which of these things (or others) do you think motivates them? How can you help them get more of what motivates them?
Have an open dialogue with your employees about their careers.
The value of this thought exercise will grow exponentially if you turn it into a dialogue with your teammates.
Build trust with your teammates and talk to them frequently about their career aspirations, hopes, and desires. This will move you from guessing about what motivates them to knowing. In partnership, you will help them move closer to “Actively Engaged”.
Improve your leadership capabilities.
In a recent HBR article, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman examined the relationship between leadership capability and the percentage of employees “willing to go the extra mile”. Their data showed that, for the worst leaders, only about 20% of employees will put forth exceptional effort. For average leaders, this grows to 34%.
For the best leaders, 62% of employees will go the extra mile.
So, if you want to build an engaged, high-performing team, it’s clear that investing in your leadership capabilities will pay dividends.