Personal essays
Getting more from your employees
Listening habits*
When I was single, the radio was on in my apartment all the time.
In college I’d listen to The Big Mattress in the morning and often listen to BCN or college radio throughout the day.
When I graduated I slowly migrated to NPR or whatever radio station I was working at, our competitors, and whatever station I wanted to work at next.
I’m not proud to say that at one point I found myself waking to Stern, but that first hour - from 6 - 7 am seemed to have a different tone to it and he was very good at radio.
I always knew I’d heard something interesting or important when I turned to look at my speakers as if I was looking at the person who had said something.
I definitely knew something had penetrated when I talked back to my radio.
“Wait, what?” I’d ask. I might reach for a pen and a piece of paper and write a note to myself.
We didn’t have phones in those days.
What we listened to was part of our lives. We’d talk to our friends about Cokey’s segment this morning where we heard her dog in the background or Nina’s take on the Supreme Court and we all liked to imitate how Sylvia Poggioli said her name when signing off from stories.
And then I got married, had teaching jobs, started raising kids and we were more likely to play the Wiggles or Elmopalooza than anything we used to listen to.
What did you say
Now that I’m single again, I listen to a lot of audio again.
I start and end each day listening to podcasts and audio books the way I used to listen up and down the radio dial in the old days.
Sunday morning I flipped over to look at my phone and I asked, “wait, what did you say?”
I tapped the rewind button a couple of times to back the audio up thirty seconds.
Mike and Angela had been talking about burnout - a topic my friend Jaimee gives awesome talks on - and then Mike said that quiet quitting is “when, you know, unmotivated, disinterested, checked out employees, they’re just trying to do the bare minimum so that nobody even notices that they are not quite engaged anymore.”
Angela had never heard of the term and Mike continued to misdefine it and mischaracterize it.
I tapped pause.
If you define quiet quitting like that then it sounds awful. It sounds as if the employee is trying to take advantage of the boss.
My understanding of it is quite different.
On your own time
We agree that I’ll work for you from, say 9 to 5. And I come in or work from home - whatever we’ve agreed on - and I put in a solid day of work, doing the best for you. And then you email me at 6 with just one more thing and you expect me to respond. And maybe at 9 pm you think of something you need from me right now and you get angry if I don’t get back to you with it.
Quiet quitting initially meant that I’m going to start taking back my time. I’ll give you my all from 9 to 5 (or whatever we’ve agreed on), but other than that - unless it’s an actual emergency, other things can wait until tomorrow when I’m back at work.
This is a real divide and it can get murky.
For years, commute time was in addition to the hours from 9 to 5. The job is from 9 to 5 and the job is over here. You live over there. It’s on you to get from where you live to where you work.
But then there was the shutdown and we all worked from home. Suddenly, we didn’t have to pay a commute tax. We did our jobs and did a great job of them from 9 to 5 and now you want me back in the office. If there’s a good reason for me to be back in the office, then I’m ok with that. If there isn’t, then maybe we should split the commute time and half of it should come out of your time and half of it should come out of my time.
It’s murky.
But actual work? What are you doing contacting me over the weekend because you need me to run a report with some different numbers.
Lincoln’s razor
Well, now what do I listen to?
Oh look, there’s Kara doing an interview on the Politics of Disagreement with Steve Inskeep about his book “Differ we must”.
Inskeep says that one of Lincoln’s strengths was that even in his day it was difficult to work with or convince someone with different beliefs. But, you can often reach people with common interests.
I’m lucky to take jobs that matter to me. My interests and the boss’ are usually aligned.
We have different metrics and methods - but we both want me to work hard to accomplish the goal.
Tons of studies have shown that if you make an employee work long hours and do a ton of work outside of an ordinary work day, they will get that time back somehow.
While they are in the office working the next day they may be day dreaming or scanning the web or otherwise not be engaged in the task at hand.
Getting your employees to work longer and harder is a false accomplishment - they don’t really. They learn to pace themselves and noone benefits.
That’s when you get “unmotivated, disinterested, checked out employees, they’re just trying to do the bare minimum so that nobody even notices that they are not quite engaged anymore.”
I’d rather have an employee who has quietly quit and is kicking ass from 9 to 5.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 186. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe