John Winner, CEO, Kizen, joins Cheddar News to discuss the trend of 'quiet quitting' at work, if it's ever a good idea, and the pushback against 'hustle culture' as younger generations prioritize better work-life balance. 

Opening Bell

Breaking Down 'Quiet Quitting' at Work

I want to welcome in john winner Ceo of Kaizen to help make sense of what we're seeing now on Tiktok as quiet quitting. But this historically, I think has happened before. I wonder though, before we get into historical context, if we just look at the idea that is this ever really a good idea. Certainly not for the employer side, but even essentially for the employee, Yes, thank you for having me today. Alicia, I'm very excited to be here. Um, this is a really big topic today and I think it's first important to establish the exact definition of this and how people are using it. So as we saw in the intro clip here, fundamentally, quiet quitting is being used to describe an employee deciding to engage less in their work. And there's really two levels of this as you talked about as we get into the history level one is, I'm going to keep doing my job requirements, but no longer going to go above and beyond right and level two is, I'm gonna do the absolute minimum to not get fired. So is this ever a good idea? Fundamentally, this gets back to the three root causes of why people are participating in quiet quitting. Um, first of all experiencing burnout. 2nd of all feeling undervalued, you know, by their employer. And third having issues with their direct management or the workplace culture. So if someone is burnt out and needs to recover a bit, maybe it could be healthy to keep doing a good job of your requirements and also, you know, kind of back it down on some of the extra effort to allow yourself some time to recharge. Additionally, if someone doesn't see this as their long term place where they have room to grow, they may take that extra effort, they've been putting it in and put that into a job search. I also think there is this broader context, an idea that you look at this youngest generation entering the workforce that has entered the workforce they did so really during the disconnected period. That was this pandemic. Right? I wonder how does that impact the culture, the attitudes and even the expectations that they've adopted in the workforce right now. Yes, definitely. I think this is a great point and joining during this time period. Is that a major impact on them frankly and scientifically speaking work has been a lot less fun for them um without the personal connection that they've developed, you know with their coworkers and and management as the company. So as a society, the pandemic has sent such a curve ball to us and companies are still learning how to manage and build culture in this new environment. That's been really hard for everyone, especially this youngest generation of workers. And I also think that their expectations for work, that's a great point that you bring up as well. A lot of this goes into not only their experience with the workforce so far but the role of technology in their lives and that they've grown up with technology that's more personalized to them, that's been instant and faster and these expectations have shaped um you know what they expect from their jobs as well. So when you look at social media, this trend obviously is pretty big on Tiktok right now in terms of people understanding it or talking about it. What are your thoughts in terms of social media, positively or negatively affecting young professionals? Yeah, So first of all, I think there's some major benefits to platforms like Tiktok, right? You see ideas spread faster and it's easier than ever for people to find a community that is like them. And what this means is that people are able to learn faster than ever before, they can develop new skills. We're seeing a rise in soft skills, which is all great. However, there is a danger to platforms like this as well. Um they can really become an echo chamber and I think it's important for people to seek understanding of other perspectives. So if everyone in a community is 100% agreeing with each other, then I think that's a good sign to seek diversity and perspective and thought especially for people who are early in their career and trying to figure out what they want next for their career paths when we look at quiet quitting more broadly. Do you think it's also just an inevitable byproduct of the work life balance revolution that we've experienced both, you know, on social media seeing a lot of that. But then over the last two years during this pandemic, I think internally a lot of people have had that conversation with themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I think this discussion is the next chapter of, you know, whether we want to call it the great renegotiation or something else where fundamentally workers are looking to get paid for the value that they provide. Additionally, you've seen so many organizations lose personnel, there's been so many people moving around and some organizations haven't been able to rehire. So if someone is now doing two people's jobs or three people's jobs, their risk for burnout is higher and it would be natural for them to also say, hey, I'm doing a lot more work than before, I want to get paid a little bit more or can I go back to my old job, that was a little easier than this. So, absolutely. What, when I look on the employer side of this, I actually think this is really concerning, potentially there's new data, for example, that suggests american employees are less engaged at work than they have been in years with gen z millennials leading the way in that regard. Let's talk about how important employee engagement is, you know, on the employer side and what companies are doing to try and reverse this trend. Yeah, absolutely, critical. Um employee engagement is one of the most important areas that we're seeing companies focus on today. Studies have shown that highly engaged employees can be 1.5 to 3 times more productive than their less engaged peers and uh as a differentiator for hire performance. Cos it's a major emphasis area. So what we're seeing is companies turning to technology platforms like kaizen to health specifically. The goal is to turn this into a two way conversation with a greater degree of transparency between the worker and the team and the company. So there's four tactical tips that we see companies implementing. The first is engagement surveys. This is very easy, quick series of 2 to 4 questions that serve as a routine health check. So we have a number of templates in our system and there's a number that you can find by googling that makes this easy to implement in minutes. The second is more routine career planning, so engaging in a regular cadence between managers and team members to ensure that the company is supporting the career that the individuals wanting to achieve and ensuring that there is follow up and accountability on action items for those meetings. The third item is routine performance reviews with KPI S. This is something that helps everyone again stay aligned and quickly allows a conversation on if something is off track something is exceeding expectations, meeting expectations. Finally, you're seeing a large rise in incentive based compensation. Right? So what this means is there's more dynamic compensation models so that employees can better understand the impact that they're having on a business and you know, experience greater financial rewards from that. So developing a system in place so that companies can be following up On all of that in a routine basis. This isn't a one time thing. This is an ongoing relationship that companies are pouring more energy into moving forward really quickly before I have to let you go here, I've only got like 40 seconds. But I'm curious was the American workplace do for kind of a hustle culture pushed back. Anyways, I would argue that there were periods where hustle culture may have reached toxic levels. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that would agree with you on that and I think different people have always had different levels of hustle and there's different levels of opportunity. I think that american hustle culture is what created the technology in the world we have today and in that world over the past 100 years we've seen worker productivity rising while work hours have been decreasing and this is big because of all the technology and advancements that we've had in our society. So I think this in many ways is a natural byproduct, both positive and negative of all of the previous work that's been done over the past generations. Perhaps it's a bit more of a rebalancing as opposed to kind of a swift reversal, really appreciate your time and insight, Kaizen ceo john winner