Conquering Quiet Quitting: The 4 Questions You Have To Ask Disengaged Employees Before It’s Too Late

Survey data from Monster suggests that six out of ten employees are currently engaged in quiet quitting. In a separate survey, only 34% of employees told Gallup that they feel engaged. Is your entire workforce headed out the door? Most workers are not engaged, and never emotionally connected to their jobs. When there is a deeper connection to the organization, we all know the impact on performance, customer service, sales and culture. For top performers and savvy business leaders, coaching is coming into the conversation around quiet quitting - bucking buzzwords, market conditions and timely trends. What can leaders do, or say, to help a disengaged workforce to stick around - without playing Santa Claus or agreeing to an employee’s hostage demands?

Early warning signs of disengagement can take multiple forms. Have you heard team members using a version of these phrases?

• This job isn’t good for my mental health
• I’m burned out
• I can’t get along with (insert person’s name here) - there’s no way to get around this personality conflict
• I want to pick and choose what I will do. Some parts of this job are unpleasant, so the entire job is undesirable.
• I can’t do what you’re asking because of my personal limitations (schedule, relationships, family commitments, lack of resources/skill/talent, etc.)

Top leaders recognize that coaching is not therapy. It’s a path to greater performance, and engagement. As described by the International Coaching Community, “Therapy deals with the client’s mental health. Coaching deals with the client’s mental growth. The client’s motive for entering therapy or counseling is usually to get away from pain or discomfort, rather than moving towards desired goals.”

According to MIT Human Resources, there are four key foundational principals necessary in order to make coaching work:

• Employees want to succeed at work.
• Employees can contribute ideas on how work should be performed.
• Employees will work hard to achieve goals that they have played a role in developing.
• Employees are open to learning if they recognize the value to them in terms of improved success on the job and subsequent reward and recognition.

Here are five valuable questions to consider, when challenging circumstances arise:

1. Is that true? We often assign permanent characteristics to a temporary situation. It’s easy to fall into the trap that how things are right now is the way that they will always be. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” People and circumstances can change - and so can you. Top leaders begin with a spirit of inquiry, wrapped inside a willingness to listen, building a conversation around curiosity. Luckily, people can change, and tomorrow is not the same as yesterday. Have you ever met someone, and thought they were a bit of a jerk, and then: they became your best friend, your best boss...or your husband, or your wife? When quiet quitting is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, no one wins. As Thomas Edison famously said, “There is a better way. Find It.”
2. What Else Could This Mean? An attitude adjustment is particularly important to engineers. Because engineers know that attitude literally describes how you attack a situation. “Attitude”, to aeronautical engineers, describes the way that an airplane wing meets the wind. Depending on the attitude, the plane will liftoff, or land. Seems that attitude can impact your altitude. And, for employees who are frustrated, consider the situation that’s causing the discomfort. The interpretation of circumstances is creating our attitude - so, what else could this mean? Is there another way of looking at the same situation? Assigning an attitude to someone is an ineffective way to create change - command and control isn’t coaching, and it isn’t what works. Because true and lasting change doesn’t come from external commands, it comes from internal insights. “Control leads to compliance,” says the author of The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink. “Autonomy leads to engagement.”
3. What needs to be done? If an employee is burnt out, or feeling overwhelmed, the best leaders turn that problem into a project. Sometimes, that project means pointing people towards mental health resources, or coaching, to find the support they need. However, top leaders recognize that it’s up to the employee to identify and agree to the course of action. Top leaders are offering acknowledgement and seeking agreement - so that everyone knows what needs to be done.
4. How Can I Help You? This question may seem to contradict the answer above, but top leaders see their role in creating and offering solutions - not assuming accountability (because the team member must find their own way to deliver the necessary results). How can leaders help employees to find the path to greater engagement? By understanding that every employee is responsible for their own actions, and their own destiny. Sometimes that path involves moving into a new role, moving into new duties...or dutifully moving someone out of the organization. After all, people will teach you how to treat them. If an employee remains a poor performer, even after coaching and opportunities for redirection, maybe the kindest thing you can do is to move that individual out of the organization.

When team members are underperforming, consider curiosity before confrontation. Don’t hesitate to ask for what you need, and don’t hold back on what needs to be said. But consider if a little bit of inquiry might provide greater insight. Feeling engaged with your job is an emotional state - and we all know that our emotional states can change. So think about the smartest way to drive engagement, by seeing what’s beyond the story that we are telling ourselves. What would happen if your team knew that you genuinely wanted to know what’s really going on, in the spirit of finding an elusive solution? The trend of quiet quitting has been with us for a long time, under different names. And disengaged employees exist within even the most enthusiastic cultures. The best leaders help team members to stay engaged, one conversation at a time.