Quiet quitting, lack of commitment & motivation or just healthy boundaries?
On quiet quitting, motivation & commitment and healthy boundaries
Hey there,
When reading about „quiet quitting“ and the reactions to it 👇…
…I asked myself: what type of motivation and commitment is actually good at work and how much of it do we need? And what does a „motivated and committed“ effort look like and what is actually just anxiety and wanting to overwork to impress your boss. So is „quite quitting“ actually protecting healthy boundaries or really stepping back and distancing yourself from your team’s results.
What is „quiet quitting“?
👉 World Economic Forum has collected the opinion pieces from The Guardian & co. and describes it as a set of behaviors like completely switching off when you are off work, to doing the bare minimum to keep your job and overall not take your job too seriously and leave space for other priorities in your life.
How does this relate to the notion of commitment and motivation at work?
Work commitment describes the level of enthusiasm someone has towards their work and work motivation is „a set of energetic forces that originate both within as well as beyond an individual's being, to initiate work-related behavior, and to determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration.”
🤷So following this definition, a reduced focus on work, and increased prioritization of life outside of work, could mean that the „quite quitting“ tendency would lead to people at work displaying lower motivation and commitment towards the responsibilities at their work.
☝️However, whether that is the case, highly depends on whether the respective person is overloaded and stressed at work and how that is impacting their enthusiasm towards their tasks and work environment to begin with.
🤔Let’s assume someone is super overloaded and stressed for longer periods of time, and on the brink of burn out, if they were to consult a coach or therapist, they‘d probably get recommended exactly those behaviors that were coined „quite quitting“ by WEF. So in this case it would be beneficial to actually tone the work enthusiasm down a bit to achieve sustainable levels of excitement around work (again).
‼️While looking at someone who has a medium to low level of enthusiasm towards their responsibilities at work anyways, doing the bare minimum may not hinder their growth, limit opportunities for meaningful challenges and actually disengage them.
How does switching off when you don’t work relate to your motivation and commitment?
There is scientific evidence that focusing on rest during your “off work” hours is actually beneficial to your overall performance at work and helps you to prevent burnout and maintain a high level of engagement, commitment and motivation.
So just because you are actually wanting to enjoy your time off does not mean you’re not motivated to come back with full force the next day, often times the opposite is the case, if you turn your focus away from work for as long as you get the first itch to start working again (because you get ideas and feel the drive, I don’t mean the FOMO anxiety that you feel after 5 min you put away your phone), its typically a sign of a healthy rest-work-rhythm.
So how does someone that is committed, motivated and engaged look like at work in 2022?
In the end the best way someone's commitment and motivation are just enabling behaviours for their performance, so if you want to judge someone’s performance, the best way is still to look 2 things: their behaviour and their outcomes.
In terms of behaviours that are associated with high team performance (of course that depends on the role to a degree), watch out for: display of empathetic behaviours like active listening, coaching and supporting others, volunteering ideas for improvement and alike.
When it comes to outcomes, its key that you define outcomes for each role, even though that is one of the hardest things to do. But only with that you can actually judge whether someone is truly “pulling their weight”.
Bottom line
I do believe that “going the extra mile” now and then is important and can be expected in good teams, but I maybe old-fashioned. However I also believe that striving for work-life-rhythm that allows you to go for a long time w/o burning out and combining your work life with your family/friends/other projects is a really positive “real trend” that Get Z brought into the work place and I am grateful for it.
Hope you enjoy your start into the next week!
Darja
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