Quiet Quitting:
The Strategies that Work & Don’t Work!

Many managers are expressing concern about ‘Quite Quitting’. They fear that Remote Working is impacting on productivity, as well as engagement.

How to optimize post-pandemic ways of working? More specifically, how to optimize remote and hybrid working to deliver performance, productivity & efficiency gains?

You probably won’t be surprised to know that there is no clear agreement on how to optimize ways of working either for remote or office based (white collar) workers. Leaders and their organizations have two principle approaches to choose from. Let’s explore them here.

Productivity Tops the Agenda

Trends such as ‘the great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting‘ have made managers suspicious. They are skeptical if they are really getting 100% from their staff.

Productivity now tops the agenda for many organizations. Fueled by increasing concerns about the economy, many big name organizations (e.g. Google and Facebook) have launched drives to boost productivity and performance. Yet, there is a surprising lack of agreement on how to make it happen.

Some are adopting the traditional approach (e.g. productivity tracking), with others adopting a more contemporary ‘ways of working’ approach.

Two Contrasting Approaches

There are two approaches to optimizing ways of working and driving performance or productivity.

The first is the ‘old school’ or traditional approach where

• Management issues edits and commands, introducing new targets or controls, backed up by some form of traditional reward or threat of sanction. Some new tools or training may be provided.
• In the background there is a subtle (or not so subtle) ‘shape up or ship out‘ message and a fear of a headcount reduction.
• As we will explore the adoption of this traditional approach has led to a rise in productivity tracking -using software to track what workers are doing.
• Some have even gone as far as suggesting that every employee should have a publicly-available job performance file¹

The second, more contemporary approach:

• Is based on engaging and empowering teams to optimize and refine ‘the Way We Work’ (i.e. the team).
• Recognizes the team as the primary vehicle through work gets done based on engagement and reflects a more sophisticated view of human performance motivation.
• The aim is to realize benefits for not just the organization, but for those doing the work too.

The traditional approach is contrasted with the more contemporary approach in the table below:

Traditional	Contemporary
Top Down control	Bottom up engagement
Traditional carrot & stick approach	Leverages power of intrinsic motivation
Organization wide transformation	Team-centric approach
Compliance is required	Commitment is key
Low Trust	High Trust
Organization Wins	Win-Win
Vague or aspirational Goals	Practical, Actionable Agenda

‘Performance Tracking Takes-off

‘Trust but verify’ were the words famously spoken by Ronald Regan in respect of monitoring the implementation of nuclear arms reduction treaties. Many organizations seem to be adopting a similar approach to remote working, with 8 out of 10 of the largest US private sector employers tracking white-collar worker productivity metrics.²

Data suggests that productivity tracking software sales jumped 65% from 2019 to 2022³.

Moreover, it may come as a surprise to many executives that organizations don’t need special software to track productivity—this ‘spyware’ functionality is available to via common workplace tools such as Microsoft Office, Zoom, Slack and so on⁴.

For some this is a leap in terms of productivity and efficiency. For others, it is an Orwellian ‘big brother is watching you’ moment with the potential to take leadership back one hundred years when the height of management sophistication was a stopwatch and clipboard.

Performance Tracking Challenges

Being productive and being busy are too very different things. Looking busy is something else entirely. For those who are being tracked, ‘mouse giggling’ (an extension to your browser or a device jiggles your mouse to suggest that you are active/productive) has become a new routine.

The latest buzzword is ‘performance theatre‘ – the idea of making yourself look busier than you really are. Some suggest that this ‘theatre’ could be taking more than an hour per day⁵. But why do people feel like they need to do this? It is a clear sign that if you reward A (busyness), you cannot expect B (productivity).

If the problem was that people were not spending enough time in Teams, checking email or responding to IM, then tracking that activity would make sense. But, who says that this is correlated with performance, much less with productivity or engagement?

The answer is not for people to spend longer on teams, IM and so on. In many cases it is to spend less. In any respect electronic engagement could actually be one of the lowest forms of engagement that there is – just watch how many people have their camera off on the next Teams meeting.

While ‘productivity theatre’ steals the headlines explore the research further and you will find that ‘73% of workers get and reply to messages and notifications outside their working hours’⁶.

Knowledge Worker Productivity

But how do you measure the productivity or performance for a knowledge worker? The danger is that the definition of productivity is steeped in the old factory notions. The problem is that we are not producing widgets anymore.

Productivity for knowledge workers includes creative problem-solving, effective teamwork and collaboration, innovation, informed decision-making and so on.

Tracking how active people are based on their interaction with various applications and systems may be an obvious temptation for managers. But how well does this correlate with levels of engagement and productivity for today’s knowledge workers?

Moreover, how much will ‘Big Brother is watching you‘ really boost levels of motivation and engagement? Isn’t there a better solution than productivity Tracking?

Why It’s OK to be Paranoid About Performance!

Revealing the Leader’s Mindset

A person’s attitudes to quiet quitting productivity tracking and performance theatre can reveal a lot about them as a leader. That is their style of leadership, how they engage their people, their views on motivation, and so on. Equally, it reveals much about the culture of the organization.

It could be argued that in turning to productivity tracking software, some organizations are fighting last year’s (or to be more precise last century’s) battle when it comes to performance. They are clinging to an outmoded view of human performance, motivation and potential. They lack a basic understanding of what makes people tick.

As one of our consulting colleagues puts it: ‘Traditional attitudes to Performance Tracking and Performance Theatre suggests that too many managers have slept through the lecture on Mc Gregor’s Theory X and Y, Maslow’s Hierarchy or even Herzberg. They haven’t read Brene Brown, Carol Dweck, Shawn Anchor, Margaret Heffernan, Amy Edmondson or Dan Ariely. They haven’t heard of intrinsic motivation, Performance 2.0, Growth Mindset, Big P, Psychological Safety, or so many other ideas that have re-shaped the way we think about performance’. 

For some managers productivity tracking could be seen as a fear-based response to a legitimate concern. It might also fall into the category of a ‘paranoid process‘- the way that bureaucratic organizations seek to manage business uncertainty in low trust environments⁷.

Productivity Tracking – There’s An Easier Way!

Our data shows that the potential for a team (or a group of individuals working together) to optimize ‘the Way WE Work‘ is much more powerful than any piece of performance tracking software.

If a team is empowered to optimize ‘the way we work’ by even 3% or 5% the impact on productivity and performance is both real, significant and ongoing. Indeed, as one of our consulting team, raised on comic books, says ‘if teams had a superpower, then this is what it would be!’.

Why settle for tracking somebody’s productivity? asks one of our project coaching partners. ‘Surely, what you want to do is boost it!! The problem is that productivity tracking something you do to somebody, optimizing ways of working is something you do with somebody, indeed with a team. However, while one just gives you data, the other gives you results!’

The Role of the Leader

For enlightened leaders, using tools and methods from the last century to optimize the modern work environment won’t cut it. Today’s knowledge worker is very different to the cowed factory worker of the 1900s. He or she does not switch their brain off when they go to work, indeed that is exactly what you don’t want to happen!

Besides, the most powerful tool in boosting performance is not productivity tracking software, but rather effective leadership. If performance theatre is underway then it is not just the actors, but the theatre owners, managers and sponsors that are to blame.

Other factors that make performance tracking and performance theatre redundant include a high trust environment, appreciation and recognition, the potential for personal growth, being part of a team, a level of autonomy and a shared sense of purpose.

Ways of Working Tops the ‘Hype Curve’

What is it & Why Does it Matter?