On #quietquitting #remotework #flexibility #coasters Trust employees, they will be inspired and engaged! 😊 many of us are not coasters, we want to make it all work in a time of crisis
In 2021, there were 245 business days. For 106 of them or 43%, I suffered a disruption that would have prevented me from doing a standard 9 to 5 day in the office. Leading causes were, in order of frequency: covid restrictions, 1-month long kindergarten strike, teachers strike, school bus drivers strike, covid itself, gastro-enteritis, power outages, doctor appointments, snow storms, and home appliances failures. I could write a novel about that year.
If my employer hadn't provided its workforce with flexible hours and generous paid sick leave, I wouldn't have made it. I'm grateful for their choice to prioritize employee wellness above all during the covid crisis.
🐈Flexibility is Necessary for Wellness
I will not rewrite the book on remote work. As a matter of fact, my LinkedIn feed is full of Simon Sinek speeches about how employers should trust their employees to get things done regardless of the time and place. I sense an urgency in these quotes being shared and celebrated ad nauseam. We are scared of things going back to the way they were before.
Future.com has an excellent piece about the competitive advantages of startups that provide flexibility to their employees. Sure, memes about "9 to 5 being an artifact of the industrial age" are fun, but nothing beats data; the Future.com article provides data. Among the surveys cited by the article, I was surprised to learn that the "water cooler talk" effect is probably overestimated on an enterprise scale (that's not to say individuals don't benefit - I would consider myself the counter-example: I love me some coffee machine gossiping).
The most interesting part of the article is about the disputes over the "hybrid" model. Most employees feel hybrid means working from either the office or home, whichever is the most convenient at a given time. Employers, on the other hand, may view it as "have x employees go in office on a precise day so we can optimize our obscenely onerous office space". You need to clarify this with your employer!
🦥When Flexibility Breeds Slacking
I suspect Meta and Apple's move to bring back people to offices is a reaction to "quiet quitting". As the Wall Street Journal reports, a slew of Gen-Z are going viral on Tiktok about how they've been coasting at work: doing the bare minimum, checking out once their hours are done, not chasing that promotion or that pay raise, and valuing other ways to accomplish themselves outside of their careers.
Quiet quitting to me feels like nothing new. Analysts linking the behaviour to a social phenomenon or generational changes are just smelling their own farts. Coasting has always been present; what changed is merely the demographics. In a shrinking active population, workers now possess the bigger end of the stick. Employees can afford to coast (for now).
My take on this is that if employees can coast on a job, chances are that the tasks will be automated within the next 5 years anyway. Standford University students opened a fully automated restaurant in San Francisco and chatbots are becoming commonplace to take orders.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. In the future, we will see privileged knowledge workers benefit from the flexibility of the most successful companies. A "virtuous circle" will emerge: proficient employees will gravitate towards flexible companies, which will benefit them both. On the other hand, while the rich get richer, companies struggling with their sense of control over employees will lose their competitive edge; employees taking it easy will get replaced by AI.
I made a TikTok out of it as well: