quiet
[ kwīət/
adjective
making little or no noise.
carried out discreetly, secretly, or with moderation.
Most employers are having trouble finding enough or the right kind of workers. Work behaviors are being allowed that typically wouldn’t have been tolerated as a result and things that are usually called out are being overlooked. For most of the high-integrity type leaders we work with, this exacerbates an already existing problem: firing well.
Firing well means that you have made a reasonable attempt to help the employee succeed, and you have made them clear of the delta between their actual performance and the expected. You have put together performance improvement plans to help them get where they need to be. They are not surprised when the firing occurs.
But that isn’t what most employers do, in my experience. They “quiet fire”. They slowly choke out the employee by taking away responsibilities and rewards, and through a lack of inclusion. They isolate the problem instead of eliminating it completely. And I think they do it out of the goodness of their hearts, their acknowledgment of their own failure in the problem, their difficulty with having challenging conversations, or their disinterest in dealing with hard things.
Sound familiar? It certainly does to me.
This might sound a little controversial, but I think it is actually more kind and shows more integrity to fire someone than to leave them in a role where they are not succeeding or meeting expectations. Believe it or not, most people inherently or even obviously know when they aren’t meeting expectations. That is not a healthy situation for anyone to live in very long.
The antidote to all of this is something we all know well:
Be slow to hire
Be quick to coach, counsel, and help improve
Be quick to fire when that doesn’t work
And you would think we wouldn’t have this problem given it is a buyer’s market for employees. The opportunities to change jobs have not been this robust in some time, but concerns about the economy and the world have not been this heightened in some time either. Changing jobs, like them or not, has been the less obvious choice than we might have expected.
“Quiet firing” was what we did when we didn’t actually want to deal with the challenges of firing. That is when it was more of an employer’s market. But in an employee’s market in the context of what feels like an unsafe world, “quiet quitting” is being more commonplace. Meaning, they are still showing up to work and meeting the minimum requirements, but they have effectively quit investing or really believing in any kind of future for them in the job.
You need to look no further than many marriages we know. I have heard phrases like “waiting until the kids graduate”, “just cohabitating”, or “fell out of love”, far too often. Maybe you saw that in your parent’s marriage, but hopefully aren’t seeing it in your own. The marriage is no longer what it was or should be, but the alternatives aren’t too attractive. And they have lost the desire to try to change things for the good.
What this likely means is that the Gallup Employee Engagement Survey which has shown very slow, but gradual improvement, will likely start to decline. And if you know anything about the cost of disengagement or “quiet quitting”, it will be catastrophic to many businesses.
Consider
Have you been guilty of “quiet firing” in the past?
Are you feeling the consequences and cost of the “quiet quitting” likely happening in your organization?
Is it time to get serious about “slow to hire”, “quick to coach”, and “quick to fire”?