The Engagement Saga Continues

I am so bored with the new corporate slogan of quiet and now even loud quitting.

I also believe that Gallup has several problems with their surveys. Two weeks ago, they published the top five least engaged workforce by country and the top five most productive ones. Guess what? They were the same:-)))

As I was looking at this survey result yesterday, I thought to myself; All is well, this stat fits right in with the Pareto Principle. 20% of the workforce does 80% of the work, and the remaining is picked up by the rest. We are good!

Joke aside (or not), this data tell us a big nothing, but it raises a question.

The question relates to how Gallup defines quiet quitting: "These employees are filling a seat and watching the clock. They put in the minimum effort required and are psychologically disconnected from their employer. Although they are minimally productive, they are more likely to be stressed and burnt out than engaged workers."

My question is, what do managers and leaders do if I, as an employee, can get away with the bare minimum performance? Where is performance management? Where is clarity around goals, required performance, and expectations?

I'll tell you where. Absolutely nowhere. In the meantime, managers are busy and overwhelmed. With what? If they are not doing the job, they are hired for which is to supervise employees' performance.

People can get away with being minimally productive because management teams worldwide haven't figured out what our performance looks like and how to measure it. Is it really surprising that employees are disengaged when they sit around for hours, barely doing anything (according to them), and the management doesn't pick up on this? I would be watching the clock, too, if I was not given enough work. What else could I be doing?

Perhaps we would have a better result if they knew how to fill their working hours with valuable and important tasks and had people manage their performance.

Perhaps the title should be "The majority of the world's employees don't have enough work to go around, and they are communicating it."

It may be time to ask managers and leaders how they do not notice that their employees are slacking off. Or finally, admitting that technology has significantly reduced our workload and it is time to reduce working hours whilst maintaining salaries as the output is the same.

So which one is it going to be? We must pick one and deal with it instead of negatively labelling employees because this data tells me more about managers and leaders than employees.