Quiet Quitting and Mediocrity

A look at quiet quitting in an organization and how hiring practices cause this mediocrity

Hi All,

I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you aren’t new then again) to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …

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When you hear about companies dying, slowing down, or running out of funding the key reason that gets called out in the media is an irresponsible CEO. For example, Adam Neumann gets called out a lot for how he ran WeWork .. well... Into the ground (Yeah yeah my real estate pun fell flat). If WeCrashed was a good depiction he definitely ran it into the ground. But today I am going to argue that employees kill companies … 

Quiet quitting is the fancy word that media uses today though it was coined back in 2009. This is nothing but mediocrity. I am not much of a fan of performance reviews but most companies do this in one way, form, or shape and the employee usually gets little to no feedback with a rating of “Missed Expectations”, “Meets Expectations”, or “Exceeds expectations”. 

Now of course you can’t have a company where everyone “exceeds expectations” because then everyone just “met” expectations by virtue of being in the same bucket as everyone else. Employees walk away from their appraisals with a grade from 1-7. This stack ranking system can have a polarizing effect among employees. The reason this happens is obvious. You take a bunch of really smart, probably Type A personalities and then you divide up the work. Now of course as it goes, every company has work that is challenging and exciting, work that is so-so, and boring stuff that keeps the wheels turning. Now imagine putting a competitive Type A into one of the roles that have boring work. What do you think they’re gonna do? They are probably gonna “Quiet Quit” or just plain quit. Most employees don’t just quit, right? They stay around doing the bare minimum to survive and of course, since covid, they don’t “Quiet Quit” in one place, they do this in two places by working two jobs during a 40-hour work week. When I read this article I didn’t realize how many people do this – and I know some of them personally! 

Yet another friend told me this, almost verbatim: Look man, the work is shit and depressing for my education level but I got bills to pay and kids to take care of so what I try to straddle is the thin line between working an extra minute. This extra minute worked (or not worked) is the difference between getting laid off and not getting laid off

You may have seen this meme 

It’s funny AF! At the same time, it's true of most jobs. Companies, when they hire, optimize for the exceptional days when work will be its hardest. The day-to-day work however is less challenging and this leads to boredom 

In an effort to hire the “best” people companies compete with each other and overpromise and underdeliver on the actual job leading to dissatisfaction and likely “Quiet Quitting”. This leads to employees being mediocre because not being mediocre results in them taking on more “boring” work for which they feel they are overqualified. 

Most companies look like this, in my experience, minus startups, and smaller companies for the obvious reason that you can’t run nor hide! 

A Players: Get the best work, are well suited to do the work and reap the best rewards (5% of the organization

B Players: Get “shit” work, feel, or are really overqualified for the work they do leading to “Quite Quitting” (70% of the organization)

C Players: The employees that are happy that they have a job, are well suited to the job, and feel blessed to do work (or love their work!). These are the non-type A’s (15% of the organization

D Players: These are employees that are neither good at their work, nor do they want to do the work, probably have an attitude, and are not team players (10% of the organization)

You’ve probably seen some version of the “bottom 10% of the employees” at a company are the ones that are laid off, and that is true. These kinds of layoffs (announced or unannounced) are very common but ultimately a majority of the “talent” is still disengaged and bored leading to mediocrity. 

This mediocrity is the true killer. I’ll wager if you hire someone who can do the actual job they will be able to stretch into new roles (or can be trained to take on new employees). These are not typically who a company would consider as their star players, but they are the company's real heroes. These are of course the B players above and companies don’t think about them twice! They are accepted, and considered smart but are the true organizational killers. Companies do not focus on making them A players (limited high-quality work?) and they may not want to become C players (too good for that!) and ultimately either leave or are forced into the category of D players and the problem is then “managed”

Companies can raise standards by being more cognizant of what they’re really hiring for as well as trying to better manage these employees. Ultimately you can fool an employee with what the work is like before they enter the doors (or virtual doors) of your organization.

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