Help! My analysts are quiet quitting!
Quiet Quitting is actually great for data teams
Yes, you can have it all. You can have a high performing team that furthers your analytics program without working them beyond the limits of their physical and mental capacity. They can meet their reporting deadlines and turn in excellent quality work all while working 40 hours a week.
Imagine: an analytics team that shows up and gives 100% 8 hours a day, every day. Each employee goes home at the end of the day to their private lives, families, pets, hobbies. After an evening of not thinking about work, they sleep, and return, refreshed and ready to face the next day.
Employees whose boundaries are respected can focus their off hours on pursuits that matter to them. They don’t live in fear of the Sunday Scaries, a term used to describe the existential dread that sets in for many on Sunday afternoons. Instead of browsing job postings and responding to recruiters, they’re relaxing and planning their next weekend away.
Analysts who have time to sleep and rest their brains may be more creative and better problem solvers[i]. They have the space to find solutions and think proactively about the future, rather than constantly trying to put out the latest fire at 11pm on a Friday night. And, they’re healthier with a lower absenteeism rate[ii].
We’re not here to sap every last bit of energy and life force from our analysts. We ought to be aiming for satisfied, engaged team members who are happy to spend 40 hours a week doing a good job.
There’s no “quitting” when a team is fully engaged 40 hours a week doing an excellent job of what they were hired to do.
Why is it acceptable to expect an analyst to go “above and beyond” the terms of their contract and deliver more to us for free?
Would we expect a plumber to come to our home and go beyond the scope of their agreed upon work? (No.) Further, would the plumber perform that extra work for free?
No!
I don’t live in some kind of fantasy world. I’ve been at the helm of an analytics program. There are absolutely times when we ask more of our staff, peak times where our workload can push us a bit past capacity for a short time.
There’s a natural cadence to analytics work. It’s mostly predictable and based on time horizons: weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual reporting deadlines, or standard meetings we know we have to support. There’s the unpredictable but expected ad hoc request from an executive. And there’s the dreaded moment when you realize multiple deadlines, reports, and priority and hoc requests coalesce into a few days of busy-ness and your team is slammed. It happens.
That’s normal and a fair expectation: the majority of the time, your team should accomplish what it needs to in the contracted 40 hours. And every once in a while – not once a month, not once a quarter – perhaps once or twice a year, and under extenuating circumstances, they may be asked to work late to wrap up on deadlines.
If you are regularly approaching your team after 5pm, on weekends, or while they’re on vacation, and they’re doing the work, you do not have a sustainable analytics practice.
The real danger you face is NOT quiet quitting. It’s your staff For Real Quitting. This is the concept where the employee leaves your team entirely for a different opportunity. Instead of working 40 hours a week (Quiet Quitting) or more (our societal norm), they work a whopping 0 hours a week for you.
As the manager, you now have to recruit and train a new analyst, while managing additional workload on your remaining team. Losing an employee is far more expensive than fostering a healthy environment for the ones you’ve got.
Yeah, I’m being a little cheeky and it’s to prove a point about the stupidity of the term “Quiet Quitting”. There’s been so much preoccupation and fearmongering about how dangerous and scary Quiet Quitting is (“It’s a step toward quitting on life.” ?!) we seem to have forgotten what the final outcome of employee dissatisfaction really is.
Be careful: your team might be on their way to burning out and will For Real Quit on their own terms.
Are my analysts at risk of Quiet Quitting or For Real Quitting?
Take some time to really examine how your analytics team is functioning.
Are you noticing any symptoms of overwork or burnout amongst the team or yourself?
How many hours are my employees and I putting in each week? (Yes, the 40 hour week applies to you, too)
Where are we running into challenges with our workload? Is there a particular trigger or triggers?
Are there norms around overwork that we need to call out and address? Has my behaviour consciously or unconsciously contributed to these norms becoming solidified?
What would I change about the way we handle our workload?
Perhaps the most important: would my employees answer these questions the same way as I did? (You can confirm your employees’ thoughts in your regular 1:1 sessions)
Once you’ve given these questions some thought, you can begin implementing a few changes to improve the situation. You might have gotten some suggestions from your employees as well, if you were able to involve them in this conversation.
What you do depends on your team, your organizational context, and your level of comfort. Not everyone can make sweeping changes but nearly everyone can make incremental ones.
The unwritten rules of overwork and how you can change them
Your conscious and unconscious behaviour affects the way your team behaves. The conscious behaviour is easier to deal with:
Do you phone staff during vacations or after working hours for non emergencies?
Are you actively encouraging work beyond the 40 hour week?
It’s the unconscious behaviours that are harder to change. What are the unwritten rules about overwork that are part of your team or company norm? These are a struggle for me and I have to be deliberately mindful of things that I do that are so ingrained.
Sending emails after hours – way after hours (12am emails anyone?).
Even if you tell your team that you don’t expect or want them to work late, your actions signal that you do. Acknowledge that there is a power dynamic between boss and employee, and that working all hours of the night is an unwritten expectation. Anyway, why are you sending emails at 12am? If you’re trying to look like a hard worker, stop. This doesn’t make you look smart or hardworking, it makes you look overburdened. If it’s because you truly are overburdened, there are other root causes to address here.
Not taking vacation or PTO yourself.
Or worse, haunting your staff from a tropical island by staying in touch during your PTO. This sucks. No one wins in this situation. You lose your vacation and your team lose an opportunity to step up while you’re gone. There can be a lot at play here: trust issues, performance problems, a badly timed deadline falling during vacation. But it all says one thing: you believe that vacations don’t matter and your staff shouldn’t, either.
Extra, unpaid work expected of women and people of colour
As with so many other issues that have come to the forefront in the past few years, there’s an element of systemic discrimination here too. It’s normalized for women and people of colour to have to try so much harder just to achieve the same roles that white men have. In the workplace, that means extra hours, extra effort, in an environment that is built to keep them out.
Think about the concept of “office housework”. Setting coffee out for a meeting, tidying the room after it’s over (and the old boys club is having their parking lot conversations), escorting guests around the office, being expected to take notes: these are all examples of extra, invisible work that often gets assigned to women, and women of colour. You can control this by explicitly assigning this type of unavoidable tasks fairly amongst team members, rather than letting it all fall to one or two people all the time.
Loading staff up with so much work that they have no choice but to work overtime or on weekends to keep up.
HR might say they promote a work-life balance in all their PowerPoints and employee lunches, but does that really apply for your team?
Fill vacancies without delay. Crosstrain staff so no one individual shoulders responsibility for everything. YOU set the priorities, YOU decide what gets done.
Resourcing your team appropriately to match your desired scope is on you. If your team is overloaded, your job as a leader isn’t to squeeze them harder. Your job is to find a solution. Often that means tough conversations and prioritization. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.
Quiet Quitting isn’t the demon we thought it was
Just because something has been done this way for years or decades, doesn’t make it the right way. It just makes it the way it has been done for years and decades. It sucks that people have spent their careers trying to pay their dues only to find society shifting to a place where people don’t want to do the same. It might feel unfair that the upcoming generations are benefiting from a work/life balance that seemed inaccessible before. But these aren’t good reasons to keep things status quo.
Data professionals thrive when they have space to think. Their work is complex, requires attention to detail, and has the potential to be incredibly powerful for your organization. Our job as leaders is to encourage their excellent performance. That means helping them enforce the boundaries of their work, and setting up an environment where they can thrive during the 40 hours you have them.
You might learn that your team comes up with better insights and works more efficiently when they’re given the space to relax their brains at the end of each day. They show up with clearer minds, more engaged, with better questions to ask of the data.
If that’s Quiet Quitting, sign me up.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
[i] Proto, E. Are happy workers more productive?. IZA World of Labor 2016: 315 doi: 10.15185/izawol.315
[ii] Joel Goh, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stefanos A. Zenios (2015) The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States. Management Science 62(2):608-628. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2115
