Recruiting Leader @ Zapier | Former Educator | Advocate for job seekers, demystifying recruiting, and making the workplace more equitable for everyone!!
The "Quiet Quitting" thing is funny to me. I think the real conversation should be around "Quiet Firing" as it's rampant. You don't receive feedback or praise. You get raises of 3% or less while others are getting much more. Your 1:1s are frequently cancelled or shuffled around. You don't get invited to work on cool projects or stretch opportunities. You're not kept up-to-date on information that is relevant or critical to your work. Your manager never talks to you about your career trajectory. This happens ALL THE TIME. It works great for companies...eventually you'll either feel so incompetent, isolated, and unappreciated that you'll go find a new job, and they never have to deal with a development plan or offer severance. Or your performance will slip enough due to the lack of support that they'll be able to let you go. Instead of worrying about "quiet quitting", I'd encourage companies to look at their management practices and identify places where people are being "quiet fired" by poor managers who don't want to do the work to support, train, and coach their teams.
Poor management is everywhere, putting down your team mates does not build the management up! It shows Corporate, their upper management doesn’t know how to make heroes out of zeros. If every supervisor/foreman/FA/underBoss can’t teach every team members 1 new ability every month so by the end of the year they have perfected a completely new level of skilled production the problem is Team Leadership failing to make team mates productive. If you want to lead then do it by showing the team how to work. If you can’t lead by example, you can’t lead at all!
I don’t think that it is always poor managers (or at least the direct managers) who don’t want to do the work… sure, they exist - yet so do crummy employees. I strongly feel that a lot of managers are tasks to do the jobs of two to three people by the owners and are essentially set up to fail from the onset. They are forced to pick and choose what to deal with based on which fire is roaring at the moment. I know several who are passionate about coaching training and supporting their team but they are forced to choose to do that work which they most desire, do other work as needed to hold the wheels on the wagon or some how leave for the day in fewer than 15 hours per day to have a modicum of life outside of work. These people escalate their concerns and lack of capacity and are faced with opposition or lack of acceptance of the magnitude. They themselves want to keep their gigs but then also are between a rock and a hard place. It is simply a dang mess all around!!
That's vulture culture. It just happened to me last month, when I was "finally" fired. I was quietly dying, completely isolated; no press trips like the others, not having the chance to explain my proposals, not receiving a single good word about my work in months or information. A complete silent treatment. Even when I tried to talk to my boss and tell her what was going on (she knew, she encouraged it) the only words I got back were:"I don't like this victim attitude of yours". That's gaslighting. When I reached my manager, he did nothing to stop it or to protect me. He just let it go, knowing this was unfair. Once they put your name to a problem (probably, the real problem has nothing to do with you, but they make you believe so), you know you are done. Soon or later, you're out. They don't care about your suffering or well being. They are just waiting you to quit, until they wait no more. I hope Karma works to them as individuals, because related to companies culture, I am hopeless.
This is "quiet firing" in the professional world where the employee is likely on salary. I would add to this an even more insidious type of "quiet firing" that happens in the hourly "worker class" world, which is when the employer wants to be relieved of someone they can no longer find funding for, but they also don't want to be stuck paying unemployment, so instead they cut the employee's hours to almost nothing. The employee then has the option between staying "employed" and not making enough to pay bills, or quitting, thus disqualifying themselves from getting unemployment.
Isn’t the whole point that they do this to protect themselves legally? They want to fire, but it’s always been my understanding that they would either have to offer severance or pay out unemployment…and in some cases, even potentially open themselves to lawsuits. So they just slowly turn up the heat until the frog realizes they’re in hot water and jumps out. Until more companies really commit to a company culture that owns their hiring decisions and recognizes the need to do the work to develop employees rather than expecting them to be immediately perfect, I don’t see this changing.
I'd also add structural changes don't include your voice. Management or leadership have meetings in secret. Management or leadership don't care about your measurable achievements. Management or leadership never propose a performance improvement plan. Management or leadership arbitrarily change the rules on you and keep moving goal posts. Management or leadership never create a work plan or goal sheet.
This is spot on. Employee isolation: put in secluded offices, managers “forgetting” to put you on meeting notices, decisions made on projects without informing at all certain employees doing the work, cliques, the list goes on and on and on. If you’re lucky you’ll get the truth from one person if you ask for honest feedback - but often it will be from someone who has very little power to help. If these things are happening to you, you’re on the path to being let go. And in no way is it your fault. The toughest part of being a manager is looking someone in the eye and being forthcoming about their poor performance. If you can’t do that you are helping no one. It’s bad for that employee, it’s bad for the company. But most of all - it’s awful for you. Quiet Firing? It’s the new rage. And the CEOs and executives that let it happen — are the worst leaders.
And then they move your desk into the basement and take away your stapler.
Operations Manager
1yUnpopular opinion: Its not always a bad manager, bad employees do exist. Yes there are better ways to go about it than this but there are for sure 2 sides to every coin.