If you haven’t been following the excellent workplace and future of work coverage from Digiday Media’s WorkLife, I recommend you dive into their recent Quiet Workplace Guide. The series examines why leaders need to look beyond the headlines and buzzwords of the day to the deeper human and organizational challenges beneath them in order to lead happy, successful and productive workforces.
I spoke with Managing Editor Jessica Davies for the article “Inside the Quiet Workplace phenomenon: What leaders need to know,” and shared what organizations need to do “to stay ahead of the employee disengagement trend and ensure it doesn’t spread further.”
We discussed how “the pandemic accelerated people-related challenges that were always there but can no longer be ignored in a talent shortage that isn’t going to change even with a recession. And in a work reality that has been fundamentally transformed, people don’t necessarily want to work the way they worked before.
“But they want to be invited into the thinking about the way an organization is going to operate going forward. And until we do that people are going to quiet quit and managers are not going to be able to get the most out of their workforce.”
Employees need to be part of the process on the front side, as leaders and teams first ask, “What we need to get done (and why)” and then together re-imagine the how, when and where work happens best.
I explained, “What we’ve experienced is a crisis-driven suboptimal execution of flexibility,” including remote/hybrid work models, which continue to be a struggle for so many organizations. Some of the problems I outlined included not consistently adopting technology for efficient communication, collaboration and coordination across different workplaces, as well as the fact that most have not figured out what we’re doing when we do come together in person.
The article also included data and perspectives from Dr. Jim Harter, chief scientist of workplace and well-being at Gallup; Peter Capelli, professor of management at the Wharton School; and Sarah Robb O’Hagan, CEO of corporate well-being consultancy Exos and a former Fortune 50 C-suite executive.
Read the full article here.