Work, the philosophy of 6 minus minus is born
From the Great Resignation to the Quiet Quitting
From the drastic phenomenon of the Great Resignation (which we have already talked about), which is none other than the wave of resignations resulting from the urgency that the COVID-19 pandemic has generated to put quality of life first over work and career, to the softer one of Quiet Quitting.
The latter refers not so much to the voluntary abandonment of the workplace, but to a more relaxed, slower management of one’s duties and above all more disinterested in career and salary growth, objectives considered false and very rarely reachable.
Only 1 in 5 employees are involved in their job
The two phenomena, Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, have the common goal of putting life before work, a trend that is emerging especially in Gen Z and Millennials and without geographical differences.
The main theme is therefore that feeling of detachment from a culture that had never questioned work, both in terms of the need to obtain results and successes.
A global phenomenon, documented by the recent Gallup study entitled “State of the Global Workplace 2022“.
According to the Gallup report (which you can find here in detail), only 21% of employees are really involved in their work and only 33% consider themselves in a condition of growth and well-being.
44%, on the other hand, feel stressed that they don’t feel that their occupation really has a meaningful purpose.
Employee Engagement
As far as Europe is concerned, only 14% of employees are really involved. In the USA it is a little better with 31%, even if Millennials and Gen Z are particularly disheartened.
The scenario becomes dramatic if we move to Great Britain where only 9% of workers consider themselves “enagaged”.
Then there is Italy. Here, only 4% of the workers interviewed feel fully satisfied and involved at work, while for 96% of Italians, work is needed only to continue living.
Not even better in China. The young Chinese workers think they have definitively lost the possibility of moving up the social ladder.
Here then is that Quiet Quitting becomes a sort of obstinate search for sufficiency (hence the expression 6–) which presents itself as a choice based on the voluntary renunciation of active participation, to the sense of belonging of a company, to the sharing of new ideas and new points of view. Exactly the opposite of employee engagement.
Empathy and complicity for a smarter manager
Through a survey conducted by the Harward Business Review, conducted on a sample of about 3,000 managers, it was possible to observe this phenomenon from a different perspective, starting from the ability of a manager to favor engagement of its collaborators thanks to the construction of a reciprocal relationship.
What has emerged is the willingness of employees to do the bare minimum, a more widespread trend in those contexts in which managers are unable to reconcile business objectives with the needs and employee priorities. On the contrary, it is much less present in workplaces where there is empathy and complicity between managers and collaborators.
To try to solve this global problem, it is the soft skills of managers that we must pay attention to, since it is from them that collaborators expect to solve the main reasons for their dissatisfaction.
- unfairness in professional treatment
- lack of culture that emphasizes respect for people and roles in the community
- inability to recognize merits and to abolish prejudice and favouritism
- inconsistency in fees
- unreasonable handling of time and pressure
- inability to transfer clear communications
This is a topic that apparently only affects human resources, but that’s not the case.
It’s something more.It is the mirror of a much broader and more fundamental problem for every human society. Just think that business units with motivated workers score profits well in excess of 23%, while employees who are not engaged cost up to $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP.