What are your people upto?

Summary
If you've learned to manage by walking around and listening, leading an async, remote-first team will feel daunting. You may have to deal with several concurrent phenomena.

1. Unhappy team members who are quiet quitting.
2. Disengaged colleagues who're moonlighting.
3. People who seem like their slacking off, but are actually struggling.

To pre-empt these situations, you'll need to adapt your leadership style. Shift away from an office-centric mindset, adopt an outcome oriented approach to management, focus on connection, coaching and well being and find data sources that provide meaningful information radiators so you can gauge team health.

While working asynchronously can boost productivity, it represents a people management challenge. If you’ve grown up with a philosophy of MBWAL - management by walking around and listening - there’s no longer a place to walk around in, or by overhearing conversations. Yeah, you can stay tuned to instant messaging, or even keep track of all the updates on your task boards and wikis, but it still doesn’t feel the same. No wonder, bosses are the only group of people who still prefer being in the office. 

It’s easy to say that these bosses need to learn a new set of skills. I think we should also acknowledge that leading async teams isn’t simple or intuitive for everyone. The world of work is changing fast, and managers are having to wrap their heads around several concurrent trends that they had limited exposure to before this. So, let’s unpack some of what's happening as managers can’t walk around and listen anymore.

Unhappy people may be quiet quitting

If “The Great Resignation” was the term of 2021, “Quiet quitting” is the term of 2022. The most popular article doing the rounds about the topic is the one by HBR. It defines quiet quitting as the phenomena where employees do the bare minimum to keep their jobs. 

Think of it this way. Traditional management philosophy visualises employees across a performance bell curve. 

• The minority on the left are underperforming. They’re either due for severance or you’d at least put them on a performance improvement plan. 

• Then there are those on the right-hand side of the bell curve. These are people who exceed expectations. They’re often a minority as well.

• The bulk of people sit in the middle of the bell curve. These people are meeting expectations. They keep your team or company going.

Visualising quiet-quitting

Before I go any further, I must clarify that I have no love for this bell curve. It helps make a point for the argument I’m making, but I dislike it because of managers’ tendency to force-fit employees to the curve. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back to the quiet quitters. These are individuals who are in the middle of the bell curve, but on the left edge. They’re doing the least you’d expect from them. 

HBR lays the blame for quiet quitting solely on bad bosses. Data from Zenger and Folkman is damning.

You’re five times more likely to “quiet quit” if you work for the least effective managers, as compared to the most effective ones. Conversely, you’re three times more likely to go the extra mile when working for the most effective managers than for the least effective ones. 

Is this new though? I don’t think so. We’ve always known that “People leave managers, not companies.”. The discussion about quiet quitting has just made that a truism. The data reveals what we’ve always known.

“Quiet quitting" isn't laziness. Doing the bare minimum is a common response to bullshit jobs, abusive bosses, and low pay. When they don't feel cared about, people eventually stop caring.” - Adam Grant

Disengaged employees could be moonlighting

Some weeks back Indian IT major fired 300 employees who were also working for their competitors. As you’d expect, people were quick to blame remote work as the culprit. After all, employees were able to do two jobs because no one was looking over their shoulders, right?  

Let’s first call a spade a spade. Working for your employer’s competitors is unethical and indefensible. Employers are well within their rights to take disciplinary, even legal action against employees that engage in such a breach of trust. 

The bigger issue is that these are the bad apples that spoil the barrel for the majority of remote workers that work ethically. Moonlighting by itself isn’t a problem. I’m working on a book project outside my day job. Technically speaking, that’s a “commercial activity”. What makes it legit, is that I’m doing it with my employers’ consent and that it doesn’t interfere with their business. If anything, it only complements it. There’s no harm in having a side hustle if it doesn’t hurt your day job or your employers’ best interests.

All this said, here’s something to consider for leaders and managers in the era of asynchronous, remote work. A 40-hour work week isn’t exactly a walk in the park. If you have a proper job to do, you should be beat by the end of that week. When employees have the mental space to seek out another job, it says something about how little your job challenges and engages them. Moonlighting, like quiet quitting, isn’t a new phenomenon. It just becomes a greater possibility in a post pandemic, autonomous work environment.

Slacking off is a sign of struggle

To this day, managers have misgivings about employees slacking off when they’re working remotely. When you cut out the productivity theatre, you lose a traditional way to ‘monitor’ employees. And let’s be clear, there are times when people aren’t giving their 100% to work. 

Sometimes this lack of commitment is just because you hired the wrong person. Hiring mistakes happen, regardless of how robust your hiring process is. It’s important to recognise those mistakes and intervene in time. If you’ve hired the right person though, it’s worth asking why these people aren’t giving the job a fair crack. 

I see three common reasons why people “slack off”, even when they aren’t “quiet quitting”. It needs an alert manager to diagnose these reasons so they can get the most out of their people.

1. A struggle with autonomy. Remote work is a new sport for many people. Asynchronous first remote work takes that sport to the next level. The secret ingredient? Autonomy. But not everyone’s comfortable with autonomy. Some people want others to tell them what to do. Others don’t know how to turn off distractions and focus on work. Not only does this way of working need new literacies, but it also requires a new attitude to work.

2. A skill-gap. This is something most managers should be familiar with. It’s just that skill gaps that are visible in a co-located, synchronous environment, become difficult to spot in a remote, asynchronous workplace.

3. Unclear expectations. There’s nothing worse than not knowing what your colleagues expect of you. Not only does it feel like shooting blind, but it can also even feel like shooting a moving target. When expectations aren’t clear, people do the best they know or worse, the least they can. Given how easy the fix is, I wonder why this problem occurs more often than it really should.

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Effective managers can pre-empt most of these problems. But first, companies need to recognise the need for effective people managers and second, they need to acknowledge that in a remote-first workplace, it’ll need some new skills and a shift in mindset. That shift in mindset begins by acknowledging that the office-centric model to remote work is ineffective. 

Alexia Cambon, director, Gartner HR practice.

“Force-fitting a design created for a different environment exacerbates fatigue, and fatigue impacts many talent outcomes. When employees experience high levels of fatigue, employee performance decreases by up to 33%, feelings of inclusion decrease by up to 44% and employees are up to 54% less likely to remain with their employer.”

As a consequence, managers will now need to lead with clear expectations and an outcome-oriented approach to leadership as against an input oriented approach which incentivises hours and presence. While meetings will be the last resort and not the first option, 1:1 meetings will be a key tool to sense well-being, and to coach one’s direct reports through guidance and feedback.

And lastly there’s no substitute for meaningful data. Ariel Illouz of LinearB lists six key indicators for team health that managers can keep an eye out for.

• Consecutive days worked

• Number of open tasks per team member 

• Unfocused work 

• Elevated levels of rework

• Number of bugs/fire drills per iteration 

• Team members acting out of character

If you’re a manager of an async, remote-first team, spend some time thinking about how you want to execute your role and support your colleagues. Reimagine your communication patterns. Figure out what being “high-touch” means in this environment. MBWAL is dead. You need different information radiators. Identify where you get your data from. And while you’re at it, explore the leadership and management sections of this site to shape your approach.