Could quiet quitting be a symptom of low trust?
Each year, many companies set out to accomplish more ambitious goals than the year prior. With these raised expectations, employees are expected to work harder and achieve more. Leaders often don’t do enough to share success and celebrate achievements, despite company emphasis on the importance of meeting or exceeding goals.
You may have heard stories about “quiet quitting” circulating around social media lately, and for good reason. Are employees motivated to put in more of their energy, passion and effort into their career, or just showing up for the task at hand?
Quiet quitting is less about employee’s willingness to work more creatively and more about leadership’s ability to build a relationship built on trust, so the team isn’t just counting down the minutes until they can log off for the day.
Moving from transactional to transformational leadership
Can you recall a time in your career when you had a leader who made you feel undervalued or unappreciated? Perhaps you felt like the bare minimum was all you had to give, based on your manager’s behavior. Isn’t this a transactional relationship, where you check in and check out?
Then there are inspiring mentors and leaders motivating you to be your best self—you want to show up for that energy, and want to do everything you can to accomplish the goals and objectives. Isn’t this a transformational relationship, where many positive outcomes are possible?
A big difference between these two scenarios, which happen to many of us as we encounter different work environments and situations, is the ability to share success within and across an organization.
Regulating and understanding TRUST
Creating trust in an organization can be as simple as TRUST:
Shared Success
Test Assumptions
When we use this model as a roadmap, we can be aware of our mindset, intentions and impact. This puts us in our prefrontal cortex where we’re best suited to make the decisions and connections that move our companies forward.
Sharing success creates a more positive environment
When leaders share success between teams and individuals, whether it comes from completing a project, meeting or exceeding financial goals, or gaining new clients, we have a higher sense of self-worth. We also feel more connected to and in tune with the organization, including having more trust in it.
As an employee, how does it feel if success is not shared, credit not given, and accomplishments go unrecognized?
Tips to share success with employees:
- Reflect on and acknowledge the work. It doesn’t have to be an extensive breakdown but can be something like: “because of the work that went into x,y,z tasks, we were able to successfully achieve x result.”
- Give credit where credit is due. Recognizing hard work and acknowledging the employees who helped in the process gives employees validation and encouragement.
- Celebrate! Reward employees by taking their minds off of work. A team lunch, extra break time, or a fun workshop/ activity are great ways to build relationships and show employee appreciation.
Stay tuned for the next and final article in our Organizational Trust series, where we’ll dive deep into Test Assumptions. For more information and to schedule time with one of our experts, email us at experts@orcahrsolutions.com.