We can change… the reactive spiral
If we can see it isn’t serving us
This October 2022 series is an attempt to capture the conversation that isn’t currently happening about the shift now underway in our relationship to work.
Over the past two weeks we’ve heard from disengaged employees who feel “I need more than (and more from) work” and frustrated employers who say “I need you to (care about) work more.” We’ve seen how much these groups overlap, how complex our relationship to work has become, and how little of this conversation is taking place in any meaningful way.
Today we’ll look at the us/them dynamic that is spinning up instead. On the Miro board, I’m representing this toxic spiral of blame and shame as a tornado, tearing through our working relationships and further damaging our relationship to work.
Click to view
Next week, we’ll explore the alternative, which takes the inverse shape of a tree.
Of the (now 48) responses I’ve received to our little survey, this pair of comments sum up the vicious cycle of this tornado rather elegantly:
A Manager: Team members staying in their lane, exhibiting more “robotic-like” behavior. Less free thinking or energy contributed.
A Team Member: Feeling like the management/company does not care about me - would genuinely prefer a robot; lack of clarity over role; lack of training; over-emphasis on 'client-first' approach
Nobody wins in this dynamic. Who wants to feel like a robot in their work? Who wants to hire robots onto their team? But transactional work systems are inherently dehumanizing, reducing people to cogs (functional and interchangeable) and costs (expenses vs. assets). We’ve always known this on some level, always felt the weight of it in our Sunday Scaries and cases of the Mondays:
And we’ve played along, because we thought we had to. Then we had this profoundly re-humanizing experience—disruption to the status quo, immersion in non-office spaces, societal reconsideration of what healthy looks like—and suddenly the system is no longer tenable. (The same happens to Peter in the movie, of course, but through the mystical means of hypnosis.)
Now we are changed. But the system remains. We resist. It insists. And around we go.
Let’s look at this tornado—and the destruction it causes—through the lens of the forces that motivate all of us. The SCARF model of threat/reward response is one of my favorite tools for understanding why people do what we do. It stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness—five basic needs we humans have. When these needs are rewarded, we feel safe, secure and engaged. When they are lacking, we feel threatened. We naturally move toward that which rewards us with more of these, and we naturally move away from anything that threatens them.
As we’ll see, however, not all of these moves serve our best interests. Let’s dig in.
Status
Status refers to our social standing—our perception of where we fall in the "pecking order" or dominance hierarchy.
Workplaces are full of status rewards (you got promoted!) and threats (important leader keeps rescheduling your meeting). These are usually at the discretion—or the whim—of the people at the top of the hierarchy, another way of asserting status. Until…
A Team Member: People saw companies continue to operate as usual during the events of the last 3 years: pandemic, Black Lives Matter, insurrection on the Capitol, hurricanes, and other natural disasters; without the proper time to process it all. It puts work and life in a very different perspective.
A Team Member: Wishes were addressed to the appropriate bodies, but were not taken seriously and sat out until it was forgotten. If there is still no change after several attempts, it is too late, the credibility of the employer has disappeared, no matter how many more great promises come.
We see multiple status threats, from an employer perspective: First, work itself has fallen in the pecking order to be equal to or lesser than life itself. Then, there’s the power shift in the employees’ direction, especially amid The Great Resignation. There’s the loss of status markers—what’s the point of a corner office when everyone’s working from home?—and perceived loss of control over one’s team. Finally, even more personally, there’s the sinking feeling that one’s hardcore work ethic—essential to so many of our identities—may not be universally valued… or necessary.
A Manager: Honestly, I feel this new generation for most of them don't know how to work hard to get something. I'm a millennial and since I started in the industry I gave 300% of myself. What I find interesting in this quiet quitting though, is that it makes us take a step back and ask ourselves the huge place we gave to work in our lives, but what I find appalling from a manager perspective, is that Gen Z don't want to commit to work as we did but they still want the salary.
To see more status threat in action, check out this recent Fishbowl thread about team members who “have no desire to move up in their career.”
Certainty
Certainty refers to our ability to make accurate predictions about the future. You don’t need me to tell you all the ways our fundamental need for certainty has been threatened over the past 3 years.
As noted above, most companies met profound uncertainty with a commitment to “business as usual”… or as usual as it could be. This strategy has backfired for employees for whom business as usual is just untenable. They may not know what the “new normal,” will be, but they know they don’t want to go back to the status quo.
A Team Member: Toxic management, seemingly no way to progress career, futility in going above and beyond, micromanagement
A Team Member: Management chain making working for them really unappealing and seeing no way to advancement
A Team Member: Other staff rewarded for doing less and even bad work, Not having the heart in it anymore, do not feel like the company appreciates the staff
A Team Member: Lack of support staff as workload continues to grow and staff leave
While employers do their best to keep the ship steady in the storm, I wonder if “quiet quitting” (not just setting healthy boundaries but actually doing the bare minimum) is also a certainty play—an alternative to the uncertainty of quitting out loud.
Autonomy
Autonomy is the freedom to make choices for ourselves, our ability to work in the ways that work for us.
We know that remote and flexible work have given employees more autonomy than ever before, and after the initial rush of overwork, some are using this autonomy to exert more control over their boundaries:
A Manager: People seem to care less, in a good way. Things aren't as urgent and we are prioritizing better BUT feeling guilty about it. It's horrible. It's just setting boundaries but it backfires due to the guilt and productivity paranoia!
A Team Member: Trying to prioritize myself over a company/management which does not care about me - so shorter work hours; more frequent breaks; not going 'above and beyond'
But many are taking it one step further:
Self-Employed: I have switched from being a full time salaried employee to being a freelancer, which has allowed me to cut my hours in half while still making a healthy salary and improving my work/life balance and overall health.
Self-Employed: I already quit!
This newfound autonomy reward for employees triggers a threat response in many employers in the form of productivity paranoia, as evidenced by Microsoft’s recent finding that 87% of employees believe they are highly productive, but only 12% of CEOs agree. This perception chasm may then result in a “quiet firing.” And the tornado whirls on…
Relatedness
Relatedness refers to our feeling connected to other people and/or to something greater than ourselves.
This core need has been used as an argument for “getting people back to the office”—we’re happier/healthier/more creative/more productive when we are together in person. Which might be somewhat true for some, but marginalized workers and particularly Black employees report feeling more valued and supported (and less threatened by microaggressions) working from home.
So, what if working remotely isn’t the greatest threat to our need for relatedness? Two weeks ago, we talked explicitly about the lack of care and connection people feel from their leaders:
A Team Member: Lack of inclusion in decision-making; lack of engagement; lack of team ethos; stress; overloaded
An Executive: Loss of purpose and not continuing to be challenged
And the detachment they offer as a result:
A Manager: It’s disconnectedness, similar to burnout. People that used to have the fire and passion, you can see it slowly fade. If you don’t work in person a lot with them, you’ll notice the difference in standoffish body language during the times you do connect.
A Manager: Doing the work but not making the effort to build relationships. Not unlike behaving like a freelancer.
A Manager: I think it’s almost a personal protection reaction, detach and then when you quit, it’s less personal.
Business leaders, not realizing this pull-back originated with the perception of their own lack of caring, have been known to respond reactively with that old standard, “No one wants to work anymore.” That link is a look at how this narrative of blame has been weaponized against workers over the centuries. Take a look through these Reddit comments on a current example in the restaurant industry and tell me we aren’t caught in a tornado.
Fairness
Fairness corresponds to our sense of justice, that the right decisions are being made for the right reasons.
In some ways, we’ve been talking about fairness all along:
An Executive: They feel like they are expected to put in more to the company than the company is giving back. Teams are looking for more support from their companies to many stress, overwhelm and burnout. Many companies aren’t in a position to invest in this.
Self-employed: It's a symptom of a larger societal issue - unrealistic and unhealthy expectations of employers from their workforce that is now reaching a breaking point.
Last week, an executive told us why they believed people weren’t going above and beyond at work: “Because they aren’t incentivized to do so.” So let’s talk about incentives. Traditionally companies have used extrinsic, material incentives like salary increases, bonuses and other perks to motivate people to work hard. We’re now seeing the limitations of this transactional strategy:
Self-Employed: Any potential monetary bonuses or raises are typically not significant enough to warrant the increase in workload and the resulting burnout. Usually the only way to significantly advance in salary is to jump to another job after having learned new skills/taken on more responsibility - but even this is not very enticing because the risk of jumping into a similarly toxic team or workplace with an unhealthy work/life balance and culture is enough to give us pause.
An Executive: I think the questions are natural given how lopsided workplace incentives are. Employers demand longer hours and 'more output' in exchange for better pay & promotions. Meanwhile, workers have become increasingly aware of the importance of mental health. Quiet quitters have accepted the trade-off between enjoying peace of mind while settling for slow(er) professional growth.
A Manager: People are beyond burnt out. Companies have asked too much of them and aren’t giving back to employees effectively. It’s a two-way street.
And yet, employers don’t see it that way. Maybe they think their people are fairly compensated. Maybe they think the work isn’t that demanding. Or maybe, like this manager, they feel their hands are tied by the system they operate within:
A Manager: We live in a capitalist world, ultimately this is what is ruling our jobs. I'd love to hire 10 more people to relieve my team of what they think they need to be relieved of, but our business model won't allow it. So I'd love for Gen Z to understand that it's not us against them. It's us doing the best we can in the economic model we chose to live in. Again, I would totally understand that someone wants to work less, but something has to give in and I don't see Gen Z choosing smaller jobs and making compromises on the money they want to make.
More insidiously, some companies are on record with their preference for sticks over carrots, intentionally stoking their employees’ anxiety about losing their job as a power play. The resulting job insecurity backfires, of course, triggering every single SCARF threat, increasing burnout and decreasing productivity.
And around we go.
It’s a dire situation, this reactive, toxic spiral we find ourselves in. It is going to take a lot to get us out of it so we can start to move forward together. That will be our focus next week, in this series’ final installment.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the perspective of an executive who, despite being caught in the tornado, offers us a clear-eyed view of it.
An Executive: I think that the term "Quiet Quitting" is dangerous propaganda. There is a difference between setting healthy boundaries and not doing your job and hoping no one notices. The term "quiet quitting' is giving bad leaders permission to disregard work-life balance and is a unfortunate step backwards in the quest for supporting the mental health and well-being of employees. Particularly for employees who have always been "high performers" at cost of their personal well-being - by introducing the threat of the label of quiet quitting, those individuals won't feel comfortable setting those new boundaries, and stay stuck in unhealthy cycles.