Worried about "quiet quitting"? Look in the mirror.

Paranoia about remote work is nothing new, but the root of the problem is less about your team and more about you.

Radical shifts to established norms tend to be met with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's all FUD, as in "fudge" minus the "gee,” and if you spend any time in the journalism game you quickly develop an overwhelming aversion to the stuff. This week, I'm seeing it all over the damned place. 

Over the past few years, the biggest shift sweeping the global industrial complex like a tardy tidal wave is remote work. It's a trend that's vastly overdue built on decades-old technologies finally forced into widespread use by COVID. Over the past week the remote-work FUD has properly boiled over.

The phrase "quiet quitting" has shot from TikTok meme to C-suite talking point like a rocket. If you've missed out on the fun, it's a broad term generally applied to remote workers who are doing little more on a given day than showing up. And, given the increasingly distributed nature of the modern workplace, even "showing up" is debatable.

As with all things FUD, you need to ignore the buzz and focus on the problem. While it's impossible to get hard metrics, if I had to guess I'd say the actual scope of this problem lies somewhere between "overblown" and "myth." However, as we all know some leaders will latch on to any reason to feel funny about remote work. This, then, is yet more ammunition for some tired old guns.

Why has this blown up so quickly? Because, like any good urban legend, it plays on primal fears. The myth of quiet quitting plays into the age-old yet everlasting belief that anyone working from home is really only "working" from home -- that is to say, doing the bare minimum between episodes of Vanderpump Rules and long naps on the sofa. 

After all, why do you think Zoom and its ilk became so popular during the pandemic? Because video calls are so much more productive than conference calls? No. A lot of questionable leaders out there wanted to be able to tell whether their teams are actually paying attention. 

But, hard as some places try, you just can't load every employee's schedule up with video calls all day every day. And that's why there's been an equally large, but rather less publicized, boon in employee monitoring software -- stuff that for all intents and purpose is spyware managed by your unwillingly complicit local IT department. Got a remote gig and a corporate laptop? Might be worth checking to see if you have something like StaffCop, ActivTrak, or Teramind spinning around in the background. 

If you're a leader and you rely on this kind of software to monitor your teams, you've killed their morale. You've shown you don't trust them. A team with no trust has no motivation. 

lf you want to invest in tools, go license some software capable of helping your team instead of just spying on them.

I'd like to strongly encourage another option. lf you want to invest in tools, go license some software capable of helping your team instead of just spying on them. Communications software like Discord, Slack, or Microsoft Teams is baseline stuff (you're already using this, right?), but task-tracking tools like Asana or Jira are gamechangers. Give your team the tools they need to manage their own productivity, then give them the keys and let them run with it. As they shape their own workflows within and between those suites, good things will come.

And make sure you learn those tools yourself. If you're asking someone for an update on a task that you could get yourself by taking a peek in Asana, I guarantee you that isn't earning you any points in the coveted Manager of the Year awards. 

And, finally, resist the temptation to turn those tools into feeds for arbitrary productivity metrics. If the only sense of the health of your team is the flat number of uneven tasks they've completed over a seven-day span, you've already lost the beat. 

Instead, speak with and work with your team like human beings. Have short, weekly check-ins with everyone -- not to get a running list of to-dos but to find out what their roadblocks are. Then, go bust your ass to clear them away. Celebrate their successes and talk frankly about your failures, because whenever someone on your team stumbles it's your job to find the wrinkle that tripped them up and pave it over. 

Most importantly, trust your team. Be their biggest ally and supporter and I promise you won't need to worry about anything like quiet quitting. Real quitting? Sure, that'll happen. Sometimes people need to move on. When the time does come for you to part ways with someone on your team you'll have a good talk about it, maybe shed a tear or two, and then proceed with a clear conscience knowing that the two of you are both better for the experience.