The Causey Consulting Podcast

Quiet Quitting, Part 2

June 23, 2022 Sara Causey
The Causey Consulting Podcast
Quiet Quitting, Part 2
Show Notes Transcript

IMHO, it's time to get selfish. Be thinking about what's best for yourself and your family.

Key topics:

✔️ As I've said before: influencers can leave you broke. If you take questionable advice from someone online, are they going to help you out if you get fired? Nope. 
✔️ I would also recommend being strategic and careful about who you're listening to. Someone who's been in recruiting for all of five minutes and who thinks it's a wise idea to ride out a recession by doing the bare minimum is prolly not your friend. Just sayin.
✔️ I had a friend who tried to ride out the dot com bust by surfing the internet at work and doing, well, basically nothing. It was all fun and games until she got fired and had a tough time rebounding from it.
✔️ There's a middle path between hustle culture and total DGAF. You don't have to work 16 hours a day or sell your soul to a company to be productive. Get out of all-or-nothing thinking.

Links I discuss in this episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5YfJV12Xyo&t=195s

https://www.youtube.com/c/JosieNaikoi

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

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Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. So today, I want to make an addendum to my episode on quiet quitting. It's something that's been on my mind a lot lately, especially in thinking about the current economy, the job market where I think things are going in the coming months, and deep, heavy sigh just some things that I think we all need to contemplate. The episode that I recorded on quiet quitting has far and away then the most interacted with episode that I've done so far for 2022. And if you go to YouTube, for example, you just type in quiet quitting, it will pull up videos with 1000s upon 1000s of views. So clearly, this is a topic that a lot of people are interested in. And initially, it sort of surprised me. I was like, gosh, that's just a short little episode to kind of define what the concept of quiet quitting is, and why I think we'll see more of it on the horizon. I'm, I'm surprised that it just blew up the way that it did. But the more I thought about it, and sort of picked it apart, I thought, no, actually, it's not that big of a surprise. There is a video on YouTube that Timothy Ward recorded called what is quiet quitting? And why are so many of us doing it. As of this recording, that video has 475,000 views on YouTube, and it says it was recorded two months ago. So that's a lot of people watching that video in a relatively short amount of time. One of the things that he talks about is that in his assessment, the first wave of the great resignation was people just quitting. And then in his mind, quiet quitting represents the second wave of the great resignation. People who maybe couldn't just completely say take this job and shove it during the first wave. They needed to keep their job for one reason or another just said, Well, I'll do the bare minimum. But I would flesh the theory out a bit further. As I've talked about before, did these people involved in the great resignation all become I almost said dot com millionaires, and I'm really dating myself, boy, did all of these people become like cryptocurrency millionaires, and so they just retired to go live on the beach and sip, daiquiris and laugh at corporate America? No, undoubtedly a few people probably did fall into that category. But the majority of people No. Did they all move into grandma's basement to live off of a $1,200 Stimulus check? No. Again, did a few people probably do that and kind of consider it like a weird paid vacation? Yes, I'm sure a handful of people probably did do that. But I'm not one of these individuals that thinks the majority of human beings who participated in the great resignation are either cryptocurrency millionaires that are living high and wide out on a beach somewhere or they're in grandma's basement, living off of a $1,200 stimulus check that they got quite some time back. Like I don't know, if you're aware of inflation, but how in the hell are you going to make$1,200 stretch that long. I mean, that would be quite a miraculous thing that's about getting into like the loaves and fishes miracle. So I actually don't think that most people who participated in the great resignation just went home for this prolonged period of time, what I've seen being out in the job market every single day, what I have seen is that most people who participated in the great resignation, have relentlessly job hopped over this course of time. Now, where they also quiet quitting at some of these places, maybe so. But I really push back against this notion that everybody just went home and said To hell with it, we're not even going to work, we're not going to do anything at all. Even if there were pockets of time where somebody said, I'm just going to take a month off, I've got enough in savings or I feel like unemployment can kind of help me get through the phase of being at home. Maybe so but in terms of like large numbers of people going home and just not working any job at all, for the past two years and some change know that that is just not what I've seen. Most people have chosen to Job hop to get more money, or to try and or I should say, to try to find a better set of circumstances a better company culture work from home arrangement, a boss who's not a toxic weirdo. That's what I have seen. So I would sort of flesh out his theory of it further to say like, yes, okay, there were some people that just completely exited the job market, but not the vast majority of people. Now, one of the words of caution that I want to give you about quiet quitting is this things that might fly in a bull market, the economy is good, the stock market is rolling, the job market is good. In fact, there is a labor shortage. And the candidates and employees hold all the cards and the hiring managers and the companies are at a major disadvantage. The kind of behavior that will fly in that sort of situation is different from what happens in a recession. If you start talking about a situation like the Great Recession of Oh, eight through 2010, where unemployment got up to like 10%. And there were I remember it, I lived it, I remember seeing people on TV, crying, food banks that didn't have anything to give out people crying, they couldn't get baby diapers. I mean, it was awful. It was awful. And I hope to God that we don't have anything like that that happens again. I really and truly don't want to ever revisit a situation like that again. So I'm not on here trying to be like all gloom and doom. What I'm trying to tell you is that this is the time that you want to get strategic, and conscientious and intentional about who you're listening to. Who are you taking your advice from? If you're going on YouTube, and you're listening to somebody who's been involved in recruiting for all of five minutes? Is that somebody that you want to be taking advice from? If I wanted to do some research on how people survived the Great Depression? Would I go and interview a 16 year old kid who you know, maybe read about it in their textbook? Or would I go and talk to someone who's 100 years old that was actually alive at that time? Who can tell me point by point what they did and didn't do to be able to make it through a crisis of that magnitude? It's not even a question in my mind, which direction I would go in. And I would encourage all of you listening today to do the same these people on YouTube, do you think they care about you as an individual person? If you take crappy advice from somebody who doesn't know what the hell they're talking about? Are they going to show up and pay your rent? Are they going to show up and take you and your family to the grocery store and say, hey, you know what, stock up multiple baskets of stuff and the tabs on me? I put out shit advice on the internet. And I'm real sorry about it. So you know, I want to help you out here. I want to do you a solid? Do you think that they're going to show up for you in that way? No. A lot of these people that are YouTubing. They're running their own business. They've got their own stick. They care about things like likes, comments, shares, and video views. And some of them know that if they pander to the audience, if they tell people what they think they want to hear, or they they make some kind of kitschy clickbait title for attention, then they'll get what they want. But are they are they going to show up for you personally and take care of your family after some of these people have gotten on the internet and said, just quiet quit just sit there and do the bare minimum and Haha, and that funny? No, they're not going to show up for you trust and believe. I personally would have a healthy level of skepticism right now, for anybody, whether they claim to be involved in HR recruiting, or whether they're from a completely different industry. And they frankly probably don't know that much about the job market. They're just opining on their YouTube channel. They come from a completely different industry. I would be skeptical right now. Anybody that's getting on the internet and advocating for you to quiet quit to be lazy as hell do the bare minimum. Haha. It's a joke. I mean, from an emotional and philosophical point of view. I mean, do you want that to be your life? I remember talking to Gary Stoll, who's involved in staffing and recruiting when I was in my first iteration of self employment. And I was trying to get my arms around why things weren't working in my business, why I just kept feeling like an epic failure all the time. And in one of his courses, he talks about this concept of space dust. If everything that you work on evaporates and turns into space dust, then that's your life. Do you want to get to your deathbed, and say, I spent a lot of time goofing off on my phone. I was able to game the system by working for maybe one hour out of eight. And then I spent the other seven playing on the internet playing on social media and Haha, wasn't that funny? I mean, what kind of a life is that? And it makes me think of Gary sambals analogy of space dust. I mean, playing on the internet for seven out of eight hours doesn't seem like something that most people would really want to do for like a 40 or 50 year career. I mean, surely there's got to be more to life than that. Now, please don't think that because I I'm saying that I'm advocating for hustle culture. I'm sitting here telling you that you better hustle and grind for 12 or 16 hours a day, if you take a vacation, you're just lazy and unmotivated. If you ever have a bad day where you're just not feeling it, and you need to just kind of zone out to get through it, that that that's a bad thing. No, no. If you read my blog, or you listen to this podcast with any frequency, you know that I hate hustle culture, I'm a big advocate of working smarter, not harder. You know, I've been trained in things like just in time and lean practices as they pertain to staffing and recruiting. I don't think that just hustle, hustle, hustle, work, we're Oh, all the time is a viable strategy for your business. Been there done that failed hard. I know what it's like to put in 16 hour days, I know what it's like to live off of fumes to fall asleep in the bed at like one in the morning with your laptop still open. But you just collapse out of exhaustion because you're just work, work work, you can work your tail off and be inefficient. You can work your tail off and hustle and grind and have nothing to show for it. So please understand, I'm not saying that you need to be on your grind. And you need to sell your soul to some manager who doesn't care about you or some company who doesn't care about you. No, no, no. I feel like the Buddhist concept of the middle path is a really important concept here. This notion of you don't go way off to one extreme or the other. And sometimes in the Western world, we get so into this all or nothing black and white cut or dry thinking it's the one or it's the other. No, it's not. You don't have to sell your soul to accompany you also don't have to sit there and try to game the system and just zone out either. You know, again, in a good economy when there's a labor shortage and you feel like your jobs pretty much stable and you can kind of do what you want. It might be get buyable it might be permissible to sit and do that. In a recession y'all a bad global financial crisis, the bust period, a depression? No, no, no, no, no, you're gonna get caught, you're gonna get busted, and then it's not going to be funny anymore. When the jig is up, it is not freakin funny. I remember a friend of mine, and she she had this job. And this was right around the.com Bust period, she had this job that she was in and she really, she started out having quite a bit of gusto and enthusiasm for it in the beginning. But over the course of time, she just burned out, which is that's natural. It's a it's a normal human thing. Sometimes if we're in a highly repetitive job, or, you know, we feel like we're in a place where there's no upward mobility, there's no new challenges, and we feel like a cog in the machine. Burnout is a very natural thing. And I was like, Well, why don't you just find another job? If you hate it that bad? If you feel like the place sucks, like, why don't you just leave, but she had it in her mind that it was going to be better to game the system than it would be to just try to go find another job. And I was out on the job market to at that point. And it was tough. You know, I've talked a little bit about this before being told over and over again, when you interview really well, you're obviously very bright, you're gonna make somebody a great employee, but not us. We want to experience you at that point in time. The economy's still in the dumper. You know, the.com Bust did happen that the horrible terrorism that occurred on 9 11 had happened, stuff was just not good in the country at that point in time. So she looked around at the job market and thought okay, it would be better to quiet quit. So she was like doing all kinds of schemes and scams on the job not working at all, not working at all. And I guess the company that she was with hadn't developed like the there for a while. I mean, I know some of the Young Bloods are gonna laugh at this. But you know, there used to be all kinds of tracking software on the computer in terms of like a net nanny. I mean, there's still tracking software, they're watching everything you do, you better know that don't get naive about it. But they would have like blockers where you couldn't get on social media and you couldn't get on certain websites. It was like you could get on things that were company related. But everything else on the internet was pretty much clamped down. And she had figured out some ways to kind of get around whatever blocks they had in place or maybe they didn't have blocks in place. I'm not really sure but she would just sit and just relentlessly surf the internet and play on like instant messengers and stuff. I mean, she she was really just playing and it got to the point where I don't think she was really doing any work at all at this company like zero Zed. She would just showing up and playing on the internet all day. And she got caught obviously and they had pages upon pages printed out from the IT department where it was like the facts are laid bare Here's what you've been doing with your time, you're fired. And then she was crying and she was all embarrassed and upset. And it's like, well, I mean, what did you think was gonna happen? You know, I mean, and that's sort of the the head scratcher moment that I'm having about the great resignation. It has been a powerful movement. And I hope that we get as much out of it as possible. When I say we, I'm talking about everybody, you know, like business owners, people who freelance like myself that don't want to work with clients who treat their freelancers and consultants, like poopoo employees, job seekers, people that deserve to be heard people that historically have been disenfranchised, so much in favor of corporate America and fat cat bosses and hiring managers. I hope that we get as much out of it as we possibly can. I'm not naive. I don't think that the great resignation is going to last forever. Just like I don't think a bull market is going to last forever. I mean, at some point, the pendulum will swing back to be candid with you. I think it already has, I think it already has I think that we're already in a recession we just haven't been quote officially told yet. At least as of me sitting here in this chair and recording this podcast episode. It hasn't been made official yet that we're in a recession. I think anybody with half a brain is kind of like, yeah, wink, wink, nudge nudge, okay, you're looking at inflation. And I mean, the the rate of inflation, they're telling you that exists and the rate of inflation, you can see with your own eyes, when you go to the gas pump, or you go to the grocery store. I mean, there's such a disparity between what we're being told, wink wink, that the rate of inflation is versus what we're actually seeing and the pinch, that we're all feeling in our pocketbooks right now. I just don't want anybody to be caught off guard. I don't want somebody thinking that a viable gameplan to survive a recession or a depression type situation is just to relentlessly job Hall. Or to sit and quiet quit play games on your phone and, and just just play it all, like it's a giant game, like, that's not going to work out. So well. I don't think as I predicted, in my initial episode about quiet quitting, I do think we will see more of it in the months to come. Because I think people will get into a job, whether they like it or not, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna job hop that one last time, or they're gonna look around, they're gonna go, Oh, crap, I got to just plant roots and stay where I'm at and try to make the best of this. And some of those people will choose to quiet quit, they will try to ascertain more or less, what's the bare minimum that I can do without getting fired or without getting dragged out by my boss. And when I'm talking about the bare minimum, I'm not talking about hustle culture. I'm not talking about clocking in at eight and then clocking out of five, taking your lunch break, and you know, actually eating. That's not what I'm talking about. When I say the bare minimum. When I say the bare minimum, I'm really thinking more like my friend who got fired during the.com Bust for relentlessly surfing the internet and getting to a point where she literally was not doing anything job related. I think you're gonna have people trying to calculate out Alright, is there any way that I can clock in at eight, do nothing, and then clock out at five and still get a paycheck? And like, I hate to be the bearer of bad news here for you. But do you think that that's going to work out if unemployment hits a large rate? Personally, I already think unemployment is higher than what we're being told right now. I'm seeing more and more people on LinkedIn posting very sad messages about hey, I got laid off. And I've been on the job market way longer than I thought I was going to be, you know, are we still in a labor shortage? I mean, what what the hell is going on and I can't find a job right now. And candidates who you know, I might have reach out to them about a project or job months ago, all of a sudden, it's like, Hey, I wasn't interested then. But I am now and it's like, the window of opportunity. Close my dude. That job has been filled. Somebody's in it. So sorry, Boucher. And I think more of that is going to happen. So for those of you listening, if you're thinking I will write out a global financial crisis by trying to do frankly, nothing at my job. I don't, I would not put my seal of approval on that. Moreover, I would tell you, if you're listening to somebody who's a commentator on YouTube, or some self professed influencer, that's telling you just game the system. Just sit back and do basically nothing and laugh about how funny it is. I would be careful with that. I would be so careful with that because that influencer, that YouTuber is not going to show up and bail you out. If you get fired and you can't find another job quickly. They're not going to show up and help you don't give a shit about you. Let's be real hashtag real talk. They don't care. They're trying to get you to watch their stuff online. There's an entire channel on YouTube. And I'm so glad that I found it because you know, I'm passionate about exposing called like tactics that are used by corporate America and the channel is called not the good girl. And the little picture she has for her youtube banner says scams cults and cautionary tales. And in her description on the about page, it says Hi, my name is Josie and 2020 I decided to not be the good girl and speak out against the multilevel marketing industry. And when I saw behind the scenes while in the top 1% I knew by doing so I would lose a lot of friends and be looked at as a toxic person. From there, it evolved to interviewing victims of scams and colds and I now also create documentaries. I've been learning how to edit videos since 2014. And all research script writing and editing is done by me unless stated otherwise, thanks for watching and quote. And when I found the channel initially, I'm like, Oh, I'm so glad I got here because this is totally the type of thing that I'm passionate about, especially as it relates to corporate America because there's a lot of interplay. There's a lot of the same tactics and techniques and NLP language programming, that that gets passed around between these various industries and that also spills into things like religious cults and sects, cults. But this woman has an entire channel dedicated to exposing not only multilevel marketing schemes, but people that are so called influencers that have scammed people. So if you think that somebody you're listening to on YouTube, whether they're an in self self professed influencer with hundreds of 1000s of followers, or there's some Joe Blow that nobody ever heard of from nowheresville, that has five minutes of recruiting experience and they're sitting back telling you, Ah, don't worry about it. We're not going to have a recession. We're not going to have unemployment go high, great resignation is gonna last forever, work from home is going to last forever, you're gonna be able to do what you want and get paid off of corporate America forever, they're not going to catch you screwing off and fire you, you're gonna be all right. Listen to that mess at your own risk. Listen to it at your own risk, and really think this is I feel like this is a good time to get selfish. You need to be thinking about yourself and your family. You need to be thinking about how you would survive if the poop hits the fan. Now, I'm not talking about Mad Max and World War Z. You know, where hordes of zombies are trying to eat Brad Pitt's brains. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking more about a great recession, tech bubble housing bubble bust. These things have happened before they've happened more than once, in my lifetime. Been there done that. Zero out of five stars. Not a fun time. But it is survivable. And some people are able to actually thrive during conditions like that some people just sort of dig in with their cars and hang on as best that they can. But I really don't want you if you if you're listening today, I don't want you to lose your house. I don't want you to get evicted from your apartment. I don't want you to not be able to buy diapers for the kid for the babies or not be able to feed your kids. That's horrible. So I myself cannot sit here in good conscience and just kind of try to be a pander and it's all over the world. The party's gonna last forever. Just sit there and do the bare minimum. Just do whatever and play it for a joke. Play it for game. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that you need to get strategic. It's not about hustle culture. It's not about selling your soul to corporate America. It's not about doing what's best for a job, a j ob where you can easily be replaced, the minute that you leave or croak. It's not about that. It's about you and your family's survival. It's about you being able to make it through an economic downturn and come out on the other side of it. Okay, maybe you work hard and get promoted and you get a raise. Maybe you come out better on the other end of it then you went in I don't know these things do happen. But at the very least I just want you guys that are that are listening to this quiet quitting and playing the hell out of it. Like Be careful there. use good judgment. use good judgment. Don't think that some YouTuber or so called influencer is going to show up and bail you out if you take their bad advice because they won't. Stay alert. Watch the markets. Don't panic, but prepare. I'll see you next time. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you haven't already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.