If you're quietly quitting, get your shit together before you're quietly fired
Career mistakes will literally cost you money! We've got you covered with a proven value-driven strategy that brings focus to your workflow and helps you get paid what you’re worth.
Do! you!
Enjoy what you do?
If not, just stop!
Don't stay there and rot!
Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)
In the past year, the term ‘quiet quitting’ has gone viral on TikTok, with the hashtag amassing more than 760 million views, according to Business Insider.
Quiet quitting has been defined as doing only the minimum requirements of your job, just shy of the extent where alarm bells would announce to your boss that you’re slacking off.
Also known as ‘coasting culture’, quiet quitting has since been joined by ‘quiet hiring’ - where employers squeeze more out of employees to fill resource gaps - and ‘quiet firing’ - where employers squeeze employees out of the business altogether by creating an unpleasant work environment.
There’s also the delightfully petty ‘act your wage’ - essentially, reducing your performance and output in accordance with the level you believe your salary to be deserving of.
A new survey released by Gallup suggests the majority of employees are currently quietly quitting and estimates that lost productivity owing to low employee engagement could account for $8.8tn globally, or 9.9 per cent of global gross domestic product. The Financial Times has visualised the survey data in this handy, but horrifying, chart:
What happened to good old-fashioned ‘do your job’? You know; go to work and perform your duties to the best of your abilities, then go home and forget about it all until the next day, at which point you clock back on and discover - only then - what has transpired in your absence. That absence being the part where you live your life and do any number of things, except check work emails and notifications.
This notion may sound unrealistic today, particularly to anyone working in the hustle culture of start-ups, tech and other precarious and fiercely competitive environments. Somehow we became very accepting of this glamourised lifestyle of living and breathing work at the exclusion of all else, including any discernible personal boundaries whatsoever.
But then we saw tech laying-off staff. By the thousands. By the tens of thousands. It was sudden, brutal and highly publicised. Around the same time, corporates began inviting - well, insisting - that workforces return to the office. Employer policies ranging from variations on France’s ‘Right to Disconnect’ to ‘Zoom-free Fridays’ attempted to set a new tone for the post-pandemic workplace. Meanwhile, employees tried to convince bosses that being able to do some laundry during business hours was not going to have a detrimental effect on the company’s share price, and that in fact, working from home was more productive than being in the office.
It’s no wonder that some of us (all of us?) took a step back at some point and asked ourselves:
‘Am I OK with this?’
‘Am I respecting my personal priorities and boundaries?’
Quiet quitting may be a response to the pandemic blurring work and home life, but employees feeling disengaged, overworked or undervalued in the workplace is nothing new. We’ve all been there.
So, now what?
Well, if you’ve been quietly quitting, perhaps now is a good time to objectively reframe things, before your boss goes ahead and quietly sacks you.
But first - quick check - are you perhaps just a little bored? Do you know your job so well that it is no longer challenging? Does it fail to energise you the way it once did?
I thought I was ‘done’ working in property at least two or three times during my career, only to realise it was time for a minor reinvention, not a major extinction. Seeking out new sectors, different markets and innovative projects renewed my interest and presented challenges that I found motivating and inspiring. The net result was job satisfaction.
By harnessing the situation, you bring it under your control and it becomes an opportunity for you to achieve personal goals, alongside the project objectives.
Taking initiative - noticing opportunities and taking action - can have a positive impact in many ways; from professional development and job satisfaction, to being recognised for adding value and rewarded with career and salary growth.
There’s a huge and distinct difference between doing extra work and truly adding value.
One of the tools we have developed at POP is designed specifically to help you understand the difference - and use it to your advantage. We gave it this short, catchy name:
STRATEGIC TASK MASTERY: How to unlock a value-driven approach to your workflow and get paid what you’re worth
Ok, perhaps not so short or catchy, BUT, it does what it says on the tin.
In a simplified and guided process, using a replicable methodology and reusable worksheet templates, we’ve created a proven framework that helps you to:
Understand which tasks add value, and which do not
Focus your attention on tasks that take you closer to your career goals
Confidently demonstrate your value in performance reviews and career discussions
Set clear priorities and goals for your workflow
Use self-leadership techniques to harness your career and earning potential
Learn a methodology that you can use time and time again
Usually only available to POP coaching clients, we’ll now be sharing the framework with Projects of Place paid subscribers. It will also be available to buy online very soon.
Managers, if you have people in your team who need help getting their shit together, you can gift them a subscription. An annual or founder subscription will save you more time and money than it costs you - it may in fact pay dividends.
Subscriptions are available with or without a 1:1 coaching session.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss a personal career development plan, of if you’d like to buy the full programme today.
Until next time,
Caitlin