#86: Quiet Quitting should just be called full time employment, Morten Bruun breaks down the risk of prioritizing full time
If over half your employee's haven't been engaged for over 20 years, and remote work has brought this from bad to unbearable, maybe you should grab the lifeline that is freelance talent?
Hey Leaders,
You ready to hit the gas pedal? Summer’s over. Kids are back in school. Time to work (or as Andreessen put it at the onset of the pandemic, it’s time to build).
A couple things really hit home this week.
The LOL factor of quit quitting and why it feels like someone complaining about their horse & buggy instead of buying a car.
An appreciation of the leaders in our industry. Our space is NOT for the get rich quicker’s. It’s for those that genuinely want to create a better life for others, with work as the medium to do that.
The importance of an explicit termination process. As we get further into the recession (albeit a weird recession), we’ll all be faced with the toughest conversations of our lives.
If done wrong, we can ruin families.
If done right, we can create win-win scenarios that keep our reputation strong, keep the business going, and keep the door open for talent you don’t need today but certainly need tomorrow.
GOOD NEWS! We added a termination clause to our social contract!
🙌 Keep The Momentum Going!!!!
Y’all really loved the Bloomberg News that “More Than 75% of US Businesses Prefer to Hire Freelancers in Uncertain Economy”.
Keep the sharing going!!!! For each share I’m giving Luca a treat 👇
😂 Quiet Quitting - literally the norm in full time employment
Quiet quitting is doing the bare minimum without getting fired. In the past couple weeks this phenomenon has taken over the internet.
I mean how funny is this NPR title - “Quiet quitting is a trend taking over TikTok and possibly your workplace”.
It’s almost like a Boomer boogeyman is sweeping through corporate board rooms whispering “watch out leaders…there’s these young people full of TikTok rage working only 38 hours”.
When we dig deeper, we see a couple truths:
Quiet quitting isn’t new. Employee engagement has always been a problem as according to Gallup, over half of employees haven’t been ‘engaged’ at work for the last 20 years.
The pandemic and remote work certainly amplified this.
The pandemic gave employees time to re-prioritize their life.
Remote work gave employees more time, more autonomy, and more freedom to live out these priorities.
Full time employment is the problem in itself. Pre-remote work full time employment was the best option. Now it’s the problem.
Let’s be real - free food, office massages, and lavish treehouses were cute bandaids, but they didn’t solve the root problem of work - full time employment isn’t the ideal employee relationship.
Quiet quitting is just a lag metric to the problem of full time employment.
🤔 So how can we ‘solve’ quiet quitting?
Let’s start with how to NOT solve for quiet quitting…
Don’t invest in surveillance/monitoring tools. You’re basically creepily sneaking into your partner’s phone while they sleep (#creep).
Don’t invest in training or communications not to do this. You’re basically telling them to keep doing it.
Don’t keep feeding into the problem of a default full time employment talent strategy!!!!
In a vacuum with no internet and no remote collaboration tools, full time is the best option.
That’s no longer true as most of what we do can be done remotely, and here’s the kicker…on an outcome/contract basis.
Now that we’ve been exposed to this world, full time talent for most work is like trying to optimize a horse and buggy rather than buying a car.
Instead, what you should do is de-prioritize full time talent strategies asap, prioritize freelance models, and provide on-ramps for your existing leaders to engage freelancers asap.
Don’t be over dramatic and change everything asap. Start small with the below hacks:
Start measure employee success through impact
Start measuring productivity success through outcomes, not hours
Start working with incredible freelancers who already work this way
More to come next week :)
🚨 Morten Bruun Shows The Risk If You Stick With Full Time First
Morten’s latest Forbes piece hits the nail in the coffin,
With the average cost of hiring a full-time employee hovering around $4,000 and an average onboarding time of one year, the cost is at direct odds with the average new hire tenure of 1.8 years.
😂 What This Looks In Action…
Prioritizing full time employment does more than expose you to quiet quitting - it keeps your company out of touch.
Case in point…LinkedIn, with LinkedIn’s first Chief HR Officer showing the the lunacy of annual anniversary posts 👇
🚀 Added to the Social Contract
We’re on V3 of the social contract! Paid leaders, find the collaborative link at the bottom.
We updated:
Legal language added to protect your clients from classification risk
Termination language to protect both talent and businesses
Paid Leaders, Check Out…
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