The productivity plunge is perplexing.

Truly an enigma.

Tech CEOs such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have been pledging to boost productivity, calling out low performers and asking their workers to do more.

That will go down like a cup of vomit.

Quiet Quitting

I had to explain to my manager about "Quiet Quitting" as she took it to mean 'people are skating by and we need processes in place to catch them red-handed'. She thought it was a challenge to overcome with brute force and vicious management.

I said, 'no, it's where they realize skating by is far better for them, compared to being hyper productive for no discernable benefit'. Then we delved into the fact that of the 60 administrative staff in our area, only 10 are getting a payrise next year. The others are either at the ceiling, or weren't considered 'good enough' to merit an increase. How exactly do you encourage people to be more productive when they know it only means more work and stress? She argued that the 'opportunity to develop and blah blah blah'.

It's not enough, and we're reaping the results. I raised a similar question with her a year ago, when I realized that one of my best staff members was burning out. This member was someone I could trust to get any task done, and I leaned on her when an area was struggling. She had a hard time saying no, while I was new and didn't realize the potential damage I was doing to her energy levels. So her being talented and willing was to her detriment, where someone on the same pay scale could do half the work with no major stressors. I asked my manager how to reward her in a genuine way, what cards did I have up my sleeve? I had none. Come performance review time, I wrote a glowing recommendation for an accelerated pay rise - both the accelerated and the standard increase were denied. She left soon after.

Now? I'm not asking any of my team to do more than they need to. They're tired, stressed and have been so for a long fucking time. They work with egomaniacs in academia and clinical settings. They work for an organization that has chronically underpaid it's staff for years, and it's now under massive financial stressors while being unable to backfill vacancies because they simply don't pay enough. We're possibly looking at another round of redundancies. Most have one foot out the door for their own sake, and I don't blame them one bit.