The Quandary of #QuietQuitting and Performance

As the long run of The Great Resignation slowly fades away, a curious trend of quiet quitting has taken the workforce spotlight.

Just like that recent mass exodus, this new approach turns its back on the traditional idea that work is tantamount to life and identity. Yet rather than overtly leaving their jobs, Gen Z and Millennial employees who quietly quit are simply deciding to show up at work and do nothing but the bare minimum. Warm body, no hustle.

One TikToker’s recent decision to quietly quit has garnered more than 3 million views and overwhelming support. At first cynical glance, this “have your cake and eat it too” fad is just a hall-pass for burnout without consequences. None of the effort – but still all of the salary.

Yet, look more deeply at the TikTok comments and you’ll see that many people view quiet quitting, in theory, as a nudge towards a better work-life balance, so employees find more energy to thrive outside the job. This evolution towards a healthy balance is truly commendable.

Balance is great. Burnout is problematic. No matter what, the conscientious employer must be able to still get a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.

This is especially critical in a contact center, where your organization’s reputation and life blood are built on providing customer service that surpasses expectation and makes a point of going above and beyond. You pride yourself on ‘extra.’ When contact center employees merely give the bare minimum it seriously detriments customer satisfaction and the bottom line.

Also, in the dynamic contact center environment, one bad apple can spoil the bunch, spreading a sense of indifference to others. And those employees who are still engaged will unfairly end up having to pick up the slack for others, so it ultimately takes a toll on your top performers, too.

The key is to look for the signs of lack of motivation, to be able to sniff out the quiet quitting.

• Is an employee less productive than they used to be?
• Is their communication and interaction with the team limited?
• Do they demonstrate a general sense of apathy?

Luckily, such factors are easily monitored with a system like NICE Performance Management. NPM gives a robust visualization of behavioral and coachable data, providing productivity related KPIs, trends, and deep dive analyses on performance. With Desktop Analytics, it can capture desktop activity to determine the productivity of each agent to easily identify employees who are indeed quiet quitting.

NPM’s truly proactive approach systematically gauges engagement levels so you can tell how much employees care about their productivity and performance results. It also creates a culture around coaching and performance, where regular check-ins with employees provide you with an understanding of their commitment and career drive – and provide them with a motivating sense of progress.

NICE Performance Management helps align your organization around a business initiative by optimizing employee performance. With direct, continuous feedback combined with coaching and gamification, employees have the visibility and motivation to create their own success. It provides a full picture of engagement so you can stay one step ahead of quiet quitters – with or without the TikTok trail. And it helps preemptively develop a larger culture of performance so employees can, in the first place, strike a happy, healthy balance between life and work.