Worried About 'Quiet Quitters'? Avoid This Surefire Way to Disengage Your Workforce Stop sabotaging your workforce by being nice. Here's how.
By Elyssa Seidman Edited by Maria Bailey
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It happens — companies hire jerks. Maybe you've even hired someone who turned out to be a thorn in your team. Unfortunately, companies often keep and promote top performers, despite poor behavior. At least, that's how it's always been.
Working for toxic bosses, feeling unappreciated and missing out on life have given rise to the latest Gen Z workplace trend, "quiet quitting" — the idea of showing up and doing the bare minimum to maintain employment. This has been exacerbated by virtual work environments with minimal oversight. Employees are waking up to the idea that they don't need to produce their best at work to get paid.
Now companies are paying attention. They're refocusing efforts on mental health, creating supportive environments and listening to employee needs to combat the withdrawal from work. But these very good intentions are being misimplemented as corporate niceness.
Leaders and bosses have become afraid to challenge their workforce
In our efforts to create kinder work cultures, leaders are unintentionally demotivating employees.
But the blunt, demanding, bulldozing boss is not the office archetype you need to worry about. Popularized recently in Brené Brown's book, Dare to Lead, the new motto in leadership is, "clear is kind, unclear is unkind." The real enemy to workplace effectiveness is the person who doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings.
Toxic environment or not, take this crystal clear example from Tesla. As most companies — post-pandemic — were exploring ways to nurture employees (like a four-day work week and hybrid offices), Elon Musk had an entirely different approach. "Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers," Musk wrote in a leaked email.
He continued, "Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in."
While this might not have been the gentle response burnout employees were hoping for, it was a clearly articulated expectation that employees could either rise to — or not. Musk doesn't leave space for quiet quitters.
Most companies are not Tesla, and most leaders are not Elon Musk.
Leaders are sabotaging their workforces with expressions that do more harm than good
In an attempt to avoid hurt feelings, managers will often tell their team the following: "That's great, I can see a lot of work went into this," "let's continue to think on that," or worse, "let's set up another meeting and talk further." These canned responses are even worse than unclear feedback. Confusing feedback often puts employees on the wrong course. No feedback puts employees on the bench.
Truly, the worst thing a leader can give an employee is a pile of nothing. "Nothing" gives the employee no direction, no motivation, no recognition and no reason to do anything further or try very hard at all on the next project.
"Nothing" leads teams to question what the work was even for. It's a catalyst for the mid-career existential crisis that pushes office workers to trade their second monitor for a chance at woodworking, which brings us full circle to quiet quitting.
Related: Quitting My $97K Job Saved My Life
Challenging your workforce motivates them to work together and succeed
Overcoming challenges give us a sense of competence and self-worth. And being challenged isn't just important for individual engagement — it's foundational for office friendships. Working together to overcome adversity — or going down in flames — bonds people over a shared experience that can't be manufactured with office icebreakers.
It's no surprise that having teammates you vibe with is essential to workplace happiness and engagement. According to a 2021 Workplace Friendship & Happiness Survey, 58% of people said happiness is more important to them than salary and nearly 57% said that having a good friend at work makes their job more enjoyable. Not everyone is lucky enough to experience the ultimate pleasure of finding a work spouse.
Employees want honesty — not sugarcoated feedback
When leaders make clear decisions, give direct feedback, and challenge employees, they actively engage teams in their work. And we know that engaged employees do not do the minimum. In an article from the Harvard Business Review, research from the Hay Group found that highly engaged employees are, on average, 50% more likely to exceed expectations than the least-engaged workers.
When leaders remove intensity from the work environment and lower expectations, employees are absolutely going to disengage to meet the bar. Leaders can treat employees like human beings and also expect great things from them. Performance does not come at the cost of human decency, but niceness over honesty is a straight shot to the bottom.
