After the “Great Resignation”, the “Quiet Quitting” … How to Motivate Employees in the Long Term?
This is the equation to solve for companies with new generations.
It's a trend as TikTok knows how to invent them so well. This trend is called “Quiet quitting”. You had barely had time to familiarize yourself with the “Great Resignation” movement when a new term appeared.
This trendy movement reveals, perhaps in a caricatured way, the drifts of a working world in search of balance.
“Quiet quitting” is based on a new moral contract between the employee and his company: respect the letter of the employment contract. No more and no less. Video testimonies are multiplying from employees who say they no longer want to take on extra responsibilities, no longer want to work unpaid hours, no longer want to perform unvalued tasks, etc.
So much so that the hashtag #quietquitting now exceeds 75 million views.
While some may see it as just another buzz, the speed at which this trend is spreading among younger generations of employees should make us collectively question what motivates us to work, and what drives us to make individual efforts in the service of a common goal.
According to numerous studies in cognitive sciences, at least two elements strongly influence this level of motivation. On the one hand, our motivation depends on the expected reward. Our brain is an organ that works on prediction: according to internal models resulting from our learning, it detects the probability that an action will lead to obtaining a reward. It can then decide based on this information whether it is worthwhile to engage in a task.
To increase employee motivation, management would simply have to increase the level of reward obtained... It is not that simple!
Research shows that external sources of motivation have only a limited influence compared to internal sources. In this case, societal changes could play a major role in the motivational crisis observed in some companies. According to a study by the Zety website, almost half of young employees want their work to help “make the world a better place”, and 59% want a “better work-life balance.”
Earning more and more money would be less rewarding than working to reduce our carbon footprint, help populations in need, or simply have time for our loved ones.
The second lever of (de)motivation is the effort required to obtain the said reward. Here again, many companies are far from being exemplary in this respect. In the digital age, the cognitive cost of work is skyrocketing: our attention is wandered to the rhythm of solicitations, video-conferencing increases our fatigue, the absence of effective breaks prevents recovery, etc. To obtain the same reward, the effort is therefore increased. Not to mention the many everyday irritants that can simply get in the way of our actions.
Result: if the effort is too great, then the prediction of a reward - even a major one - is no longer enough to motivate us. This is why, from now on, even start-ups, which excel in displaying a public interest mission and thus play on internal motivation, or even NGOs, for which the mission is perfectly in line with internal motivations, can be affected by this drop in motivation.
Great resignation, quiet quitting, commitment crisis, bore-out, burn-out, brown-out ... behind all these terms, the same challenge: to understand the functioning and the limits of the human brain and to know the intrinsic motivation levers of employees. Companies that solve this two-unknown equation should be able to offer their employees a job that motivates them in the long term!
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