If They’re Not Rowing At All, Rowing Harder Isn’t Likely…

About a dozen years ago, I was offered a position with global responsibility for the behavior-based safety process within the company I worked for. The fellow who had been in the role for more than a decade was retiring and since I had supported him by working with most of our facilities across North America, I was the logical choice to become his successor. The challenge was that I had been doing that based solely on my experience and the results we had achieved at my home facility where the guy who was retiring had been through an official training/certification process with the company we contracted with for the technology we were using. One of the requests I had in the interview process was that if I accepted the position, I would have the opportunity to go through that formal training process so I could be even more effective in the role - and so some of the executives I’d be dealing with would take me a bit more seriously. After all, some corporate environments seem far more concerned about the letters that follow our names than they are with actually achieving results…

My request for that specific training was denied, citing the cost involved and the potential for me to take a higher paying position outside the company once I had the credential. I thought both reasons were stupid! I immediately asked the gentlemen I would have reported to had I accepted the position if he knew what was worse than training someone, then having them leave. He didn’t, so I enlightened him…I explained that the only thing worse than that was not training them and having them stay - then you’re stuck with someone who isn’t good enough to go somewhere else! The seconds that followed were a bit tense but he and I had worked fairly well together for several years so he got over it soon enough.

Now let’s tie that back to the quiet quitting idea we’ve been looking at to this point… As I dug through various articles to get my head around why this has become such a hot topic, I found one on the Harvard Business Review called When Quiet Quitting Is Worse Than the Real Thing that mentioned one of the things that concerned managers the most was the folks who weren’t actively engaged were less willing to go the extra mile, stating that “their unwillingness to go the extra mile often increases the burden on their colleagues to take on extra work instead.” 

Think back to that row boat analogy I referenced before… I’ve NEVER seen an employee engagement study of any kind that’s suggested less than 50% of any organization didn’t fall in the middle category of neither actively engaged nor actively disengaged - the ones sitting in the middle of the boat who were just holding their oars… This is not a new thing! And these are now the same folks who are being referred to as the quiet quitters; if they’re oars aren’t in the water currently, I’m guessing they’re not the ones who are signing up for extra rowing…

Don’t misunderstand my point here, I’m not even beginning to suggest that this is acceptable - and I never have. I’m just saying this has been an issue for years and it now seems like everyone’s blaming it for all their shortcomings…

The reality is that 20-30% of any company who are actively engaged (the highest I’ve ever seen for any company is just over 30%) are generally the ones that drive productivity. After all, they are the ones rowing the boat! Another HBR article I found a while back describing the results these folks produce by sharing that “Increased commitment can lead to a 57% improvement in discretionary effort—that is, employees’ willingness to exceed duty’s call. That greater effort produces, on average, a 20% individual performance improvement and an 87% reduction in the desire to pull up stakes.” 

With that significant increase in discretionary effort and individual performance, I can certainly see why executives would want the 50% in the middle of the boat to engage but I’m guessing that throwing around a new buzzword won’t be quite enough to make it so! And since guilting them into sticking those oars in the water won’t likely make it happen, I believe it would serve us all well to know exactly who holds responsibility for initiating the changes we want to see - and that’s where we’ll pick up next time!