If Your Co-Workers Are ‘Quiet Quitting,’ Here’s What That Means

Sounds like some employees I've had. Not sure how you can be a manager and not be aware that someone is completely checked out.

 

Involved enough to apparently have a town hall with them and make wild-assed guesses about how many he thinks don't even open their laptops for remote work. Maybe it's just me, but that behavior doesn't scream "high functioning executive."

 

Was it a wild ass guess? Wouldn’t he know exactly who has been using their computers and who hasn’t?

 

The article quote was that he told them he believed that 30 employees hadn't opened their laptops for a month. In my experience, bosses and managers talk about what they believe happened when they don't have data to support their claim. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, just that they can't prove their assertions, but it's also sometimes a giveaway that their opinions are not shaped by facts.

Maybe "wild-ass guess" is too harsh a critique, but believing that many employees didn't do any work while remote for an entire month combined with claiming the need to multiply productivity 50x sounds like somebody talking out of their ass, imho.

 

Ideal brought to you by China owned and operated TikTok... partnered with Soros.

 

what kind of a company is he running? I talk to my directs everyday. I know what they are working on and what they have to accomplish. I don’t get bent if I call and they are running an errand because I know the hours it takes to do their job and it gets done.

They are doing the same with theirs and so on. It’s not hard. We are one week a month in the office and 3 weeks remote. Been working fine.

 

Maybe they were doing their work on their phone. Depending on the type of job, you may not need a laptop. Can do everything off your phone including connecting into the companies servers.

 

But they can see what you do on company issued phones too. Point being is they absolutely know who is working or not. He might have made it up but he’s 100% privy to that info if he wants it.

 

Actually, it's extremely easy to find that out. As a manager, I'd call IT and get a report of everyone who has logged in over the past month. That info is extremely simple to get since you have to login to corporate servers to do anything. The reports can be finetuned to include how long, network traffic, web sites accessed, corporate resources accessed. For a software engineer, it would be easy to know who is working and who isn't. Engineers really can't get way with not doing any work when there are so many metrics in place to identify slackers.

 

The latest in pretending to work when on the clock for your employer: using a gadget to simulate mouse motion so the computer system thinks you are working. Apparently, companies have gotten wise to this idea, and found ways to detect it. Wells Fargo just fired over a dozen workers for simulating work on their computers.

Wells Fargo Fires Over a Dozen for ‘Simulation of Keyboard Activity’ (yahoo.com)

 

What's funny about this is they were able to detect fake mouse motion, but not 12+ workers not doing actual work all day

 

Simpsons did it

 

McKinsey consultant has entered the chat...

 

I feel like employers should spend more time focusing on outcomes and less time micromanaging employees every minute of the day.
Plenty out there (if you find research from companies not selling something) have shown, at best, mixed results from employee tracking.

 

I would think you would have to convince them first that micromanaging people and outcomes are unrelated

 

Uh oh. I do this when sitting through online CEU classes...

 

Years ago I used something like this at home. The main reason was the computer had a very quick lock out and I got tired of logging in dozens of times a day. I think it would send an activity signal once every minute or so.


In spite of that I considered myself highly productive. The truth is many people aren’t wildly productive at office either.

Seems to me there needs to be performance metrics - what needs to be accomplished, etc. This isn’t hard to do, but managers don’t do it because they are lazy and it feels unprofessional to monitor activities of staff.

 

I thought this was going to be a thread about our defense during the Mullen years.

 

Can I ask what industry you were in?

 

It takes effort and investment to be truly lazy.