“Quiet quitting” may be overhyped in the media, but it’s very real just the same. Indeed, about half of employed Americans are doing nothing beyond the minimum required at present, according to recent data from Gallup. Tech services outsourcer and software maker IT By Design has shipped a tool for spotting quiet quitters early in response.
“We kind of give them a dashboard of who is actively disengaged,” said Sunny Kaila, the company’s CEO, in a conversation with ChannelPro at last week’s IT Nation Connect conference in Orlando.
An addition to Team GPS, the “business operating system” for MSPs that IT By Design shipped last September, the new feature draws on data that solution was already collecting to call attention to employees not exchanging messages with managers, granting “appreciation points” to colleagues, or otherwise participating in the daily of flow of life at the office.
“If there are certain individuals who’re just not engaging with anyone, you just don’t see them in any graph, any report, that normally is an indication” of quiet quitting, Kaila says.
Kaila led a breakout session on quiet quitting at IT Nation Connect in which he offered pointers for spotting the phenomenon based on his long experience hiring and managing IT workers.
“Even if you’re not using Team GPS, it’s easy to see who is not cross-functionally engaged,” he says. “If you’ve been paying attention to your people, you will know who’s engaged and who’s not engaged.”
Warning signs include opting out of morale events and after-hours social gatherings. “If someone did not join for the last three company team building activities, that’s a red flag,” Kaila says.
Kaila urges managers to respond to quiet quitting with sympathy rather than reproach. “Sometimes people are just struggling,” he observes. “We don’t know what’s going on in that person’s world.”
Asking them about what could either be a personal or professional challenge is a good first step, Kaila continues. “It should start with being intentional to reach out to people,” he says. Re-engaging a disaffected employee is much easier once you know that they’re not getting along with their manager or there’s an illness in the family at home.
Recent additions to Team GPS beyond the new dashboard include the ability to access system features from directly inside Microsoft Teams. “The best user experience comes when you don’t have to log into too many different portals,” Kaila observes.
New support for EOS, the popular operating methodology created by business guru Gino Wickman, lets Team GPS subscribers schedule and record the “same page” and “555” meetings included in that discipline.
Coming within the next 90 days, Kaila says, is new predictive analytics functionality aimed at helping MSPs anticipate good and bad developments in advance. The Team GPS company strategy module, which is the last of three core modules along with others for measuring the performance of people and teams and monitoring employee engagement, is due to reach market in the second quarter of 2023.
IT By Design announced an agreement with managed security vendor Vijilan to offer managed XDR services in February and another partnership more recently with N-able for outsourced NOC services.
