What is New

Samuel Johnson | Resenteeism | Do You Really Need A Meeting? | Factoids | Elsewhere

source: unknown

What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught.

| Samuel Johnson

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Resenteeism

Bianca London captures a new sort of ‘unquiet’ response, Resenteeism:

Resenteeism: staying in a job you’re fundamentally unhappy in due to concerns of job security or a lack of better options, and starting to actively resent it and make everyone aware of that fact. 

This seems like a significant step past ‘quiet quitting’: doing the minimum at work instead of going above and beyond, and dedicating your life to the company. They share a common starting point: the business is not a family, and it won’t love you back. In resenteeism, however, some of the subtlety of quiet quitting is dropped: resentees openly push back, perhaps as a result of being more frustrated than quiet quitters.

“Employees that feel undervalued, underappreciated, and worried about their futures are never going to be happy in their jobs, and the rise in resenteeism, while worrying, isn’t unexpected," says Pam Hinds, head of people at RotaCloud, the company that coined the term.

Hinds goes on to offer suggestions about what workers and management might do.

Management could do a better job, she suggests. In essence, the company could do a better job making the workplace more employee-centric, and walking the walk, not just talking the talk.

My sense is that this is just another proof point that We Need A New Work Culture and resenteeism is a way of expressing the belief that we can’t wait for more enlightened management to show up or grow up.

Hinds makes recommendations for employees that share a common subtext: you’re on your own. You can find another job, discuss your wants, needs, and desires with management, and take care of yourself.

My bet though, is that many who have become this disengaged have likely tried a lot of these stopgaps, and perhaps it hasn’t led to shaking the resentment.

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Do You Really Need A Meeting?

Elizabeth Grace Saunders has done us the favor of drawing a decision tree to minimize the time and effort devoted to meetings. Like a good algorithm, it attempts to do more at the outset — like asking the basic question: Have I thought through this situation? — instead of defaulting to the costly expense of a meeting.

Here’s her version, and then my augmented version:

They various ‘No’ branches can lead to states where it may be necessary to ask downstream questions, again.

Should I Hold A Meeting?

In every ‘No’ case, I have simply added ‘Do I still think I need a meeting?’. I presume that the questioner has actually done the required step, like ‘send an email’, and thought about what has been learned.

Saunders hints at these return loops. She wrote for the ‘outside input’ description:

Do I need outside input to make progress? You may be in the situation where you know what needs to be done, and you simply need to do the work. If you find yourself in this place, don’t schedule a meeting; update your to-do list and take action instead. However, if after clarifying what needs to be done to the best of your ability, you need outside input to answer questions or give feedback before you feel comfortable jumping into action, continue on.

I bet you can’t go wrong if you travel down the ‘No’ option in every case to ask yourself the framing questions of what is — in essence — a scoping process, with broadest scope questions at the beginning and more narrowly focused questions later on.

A last thought: this exercise reminds me of the dictum about fiction writing (or movie making). Every paragraph (or scene) should either advance the plot or develop the characters. In the case of what happens in business, every step should likewise advance the plot — meaning moving forward on the project at hand — or develop character, which transposes to individuals learning. What we do in those boxes following ‘No’s is learning: gathering facts, weighing issues, dreaming dreams, and ultimately winding up smarter about the problem at hand.

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Factoids

Meetings

Te-Ping Chen | Americans have tripled the time spent in meetings since 2020, data from Microsoft’s suite of business software show—leaving less time for the casual interactions that social scientists say foster happiness at work.

Housing

Annie Lowry | [The U.S.] had more housing starts in 1959 than we do now. The population has doubled. The median sales price for a single family home is six times higher than the median household income. That’s the highest ratio of any statistic that we have (the Harvard Joint Center on Housing Studies). Folks who are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing has gone up to a record 22 million households. 12 million American households are spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing.

All the younger cohorts in the workforce are confronted with this enormous barrier to equality. People spending more than 30% of their income on housing have little room for savings, childcare, or other critical economic investment.

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Wellbeing

Gallup | 67% of owner-employers are thriving in wellbeing, compared to 52% of non-employer owners, 51% of employees and 48% of self-employed workers.

People are way happier as owner-employers, no surprise.

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Elsewhere

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