BlogmyQuery – BMQ

It started as a social media buzzword. Soon enough, though, research revealed that quiet quitting is a real, global phenomenon. Just considering the US, quiet quitters reportedly make up about half of the country’s workers, according to a Gallup study from 2023.

Quiet quitting affects companies of all sizes, including startups. Its impact goes beyond the high risk of losing valuable employees. Companies worldwide can lose up to $1.5 trillion each year just from employees’ disengagement. 

Read on and find out why quiet quitting should be on your radar and what the usual signs are.

Why Should You Care about Quiet Quitting?

1. Quiet Quitting Can Be a Silent but Deadly Business Threat

The typical portrait of a quiet quitter implies an employee whose focus is only on their everyday, standard 9 to 5 tasks and who doesn’t go above and beyond or drive their responsibilities forward. According to a recent study on quiet quitting in customer success, quiet quitting is an issue across the business spectrum – from small teams under 10 members to large companies with over 500 employees.

But the situation is even more dire for startups where employees need to be, first of all, adaptable to change and willing to wear multiple hats every now and then.

Startups usually rely on a small workforce, and each team member’s performance can significantly impact business outcomes. 

Let’s just take the example of the CS team. When you have CS staff, especially a Customer Success Manager, who no longer strives to provide great customer experiences, this could lead to high customer churn and overall lower ROI.

For SaaS companies, in particular, the effects of disengaged staff can include a lack of innovation, lower-quality work, poor performance KPIs, decreased productivity, and even increased employee churn.

2. Quiet Quitting Implies Unclear and Mismatched Expectations

According to the same study, the no.1 reason why employees decide to quiet quit is due to “unclear and mismatched job expectations.” This can be a pressing issue, particularly for startups since it’s not always easy to define job roles and responsibilities. 

Sometimes the mismatch appears from the beginning. The startup founder creates a job description that doesn’t accurately and comprehensively describe what the organization expects from an employee.

Source: Quiet Quitting in Customer Success Report 2023

Employees get hired for that position but ultimately discover it’s different from what they initially thought they’d signed up for.

In other cases, employees accept taking up additional tasks outside their job description after gaining some company experience. As is often the case with startups, this leads to even more extra work and as it piles on, employees become more overwhelmed and eventually quiet quit. Most times, managers create these extra tasks without clear details, explanations, or KPIs regarding the desired outcomes.

If the extra work is out of the employees’ control or doesn’t match their skills and expertise, they’ll underperform and become frustrated and stressed.

3. Many Cases of Quiet Quitting Happen Due to Poor Compensation or Increased Workload

Extending the above example, there’s a fine line between extra work and burnout. In fact, one of the main signs of quiet quitting is when people refuse to reach a burnout state. 

While higher burnout rates were already a growing trend, the shift to remote work along with the pandemic led to an all-time high burnout and stress level across all professions, according to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) 2022 report; 79% of workers reported they had experienced work-related stress.

If employees face burnout due to more responsibilities at work for the same pay, they’ll feel stuck and undervalued. They will no longer see their workplace as a place to prosper and become disengaged and unmotivated.

In a vicious cycle, quiet quitters could create a real imbalance in your team. Their engaged and motivated co-workers and managers will have to pick up the slack and handle what quiet quitters refuse to take on. 

While some will struggle to deliver the same quality at increased velocity, others will take it as an opportunity to be recognized and advance to a new role within the company. If their efforts don’t end with a promotion or more benefits, many will ultimately become quiet quitters too.

4. Your Team May Already Have Quiet Quitters

Considering the rising number of quiet quitters based on the latest findings, it’s very possible you have at least a few of them in your team. And with the advent of remote or hybrid work, it may be difficult to notice any signals of quiet quitting due to reduced or lack of face-to-face interactions. 

But you should take note of some of the most common signs of quiet quitting, which include one or more of the following:

• not attending meetings;
• arriving late or leaving early;
• reduced productivity;
• less contribution to team projects;
• not participating in planning or meetings; 
• lack of passion or enthusiasm.

The sooner startup founders or managers identify the red flags, the better. The typical signs of quiet quitting aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, people may be temporarily discontent about some aspect of their workplace; they may encounter a bottleneck while working on a project, but they’re afraid to admit it in front of others openly. Other times, people want their managers to recognize and praise their efforts. 

When quiet quitters were asked what would motivate them to become re-engaged at the workplace, these were their answers:

Source: Quiet Quitting in Customer Success Report 2023

Startup founders should have frequent and open discussions with all their employees.  Questions like “Is everything ok in your work?” or “Is there anything I can help you with?” are good for the start of the conversation. But they should also be willing to ask more uncomfortable questions like: 

1. “Are you happy with your work?”
2. “Do you feel appreciated in the team?”
3. “Are you doing the things/tasks that you want to do?”

By showing empathy and support, managers and founders can find solutions to ensure employees are satisfied. These conversations are crucial to avoid having quiet quitters outright leave their jobs.

5. The Issue Tends to Hide in Management Practices

Clearly, quiet quitting doesn’t refer to those individuals with low levels of intrinsic motivation and productivity. Quiet quitters more or less consciously decide to focus only on doing the bare minimum at work. They’d sacrifice more time and effort at the job but don’t find a strong reason to do it. 

Many of their workplace frustrations stem from issues with their managers.

Identifying quiet quitters in your team is a good first step. But startup founders should also take a good look at their management practices. Quiet quitting is often the staff’s response to an unwelcoming workplace. If managers don’t try to build strong internal relationships and don’t create an inclusive culture, employees won’t feel motivated to be at their best.

Employees these days, particularly Gen Z and Millennials, demand trust and autonomy in their workplace. In this regard, managers should take a step back and see if the issue is with them and if their micromanagement style is frustrating their team.

Gen Z and Millennials are also more reluctant to become quiet quitters if they’re repeatedly overlooked for a promotion or realize there’s a lack of career development opportunities within the company.

There’s also a clear generational divide regarding the “do the work that you’re paid for” motto:

Source: Statista

A good manager constantly supports, trains, and coaches their team and treats employees equally. That’s why you should speak with all employees about a career progression plan and ensure they don’t feel stuck on routine, difficult, or undesirable tasks.

The whole point of quiet quitting is that workers want to feel heard and valued by leaders who genuinely consider their well-being.

Summing Up

A company’s success is directly linked with employees’ level of engagement, satisfaction, and their feeling of belonging in the workplace. By starting with clear role expectations and ending with proactive management and honest conversations, startup founders can avoid having quiet quitters in their team. 

Ultimately, the best way to counter quiet quitting is with sustainable working practices where the entire staff is treated fairly. There’s little reason to fear as long as you build a culture of trust with autonomy and respect for your employees.

Featured image by Alexander Possingham on Unsplash

The post Why Should Startup Founders Care about Quiet Quitting? appeared first on noupe.

We operate in a business space wrought with misalignment between business objectives and customer needs. It’s fascinating to see that while 69% of business leaders are pushing more budget towards personalization, 72% don’t actually consider customer needs in their personalization.

To that end, today I thought I’d give you a quick overview of some low-effort, high-return customer success tactics to better bridge the gap between you and your clients. 

Within business and SaaS particularly, meeting customer outcomes is consistently proven to be a key driver of growth. So let’s review how you can learn, understand, and adapt to service those goals.

1. Implement feedback forms throughout your product

Implementing context-aware product feedback forms represents one of the most efficient ways to get high-impact, low-effort feedback tied to specific product functionalities. By adding these short in-product surveys, you’re:

• Giving customers every opportunity to voice their feedback
• Enabling an understanding of how customers feel about specific features and functionalities
• Allowing single users to voice their unfiltered feedback without going through the account owner
• Reassuring customers that you value their opinions
• Reaffirming that by implementing high-value feedback and then going back to notify the original customers who provided said feedback.

Here’s an example of a feedback form from Jotform that you can use inside the product:

2. Launch a voice of the customer initiative

If you want to go even further from in-product forms, you can build on those to design a full voice of the customer (VoC) program within your organization. A VoC initiative does wonders for company-wide customer success alignment, allowing you to efficiently boost retention and revenue with ease just by zeroing in on what actually matters for customers.

Here’s a breakdown of things to keep in mind for a VoC process:

One of the biggest advantages of a VoC initiative is that it keeps all relevant stakeholders in the loop and allows for increased velocity for deploying product updates. Just take a look at the simple steps of a typical voice of the customer program: 

• gather the feedback
• handpick the most insightful suggestions
• forward those to stakeholders and those who can act on it
• make related adjustments and changes
• close the VoC loop by going back and informing the customer once you’ve reached a resolution or product update

Of course, the process will change based on your business specifics, but the core elements remain the same and can be applied at scale.

3. Proactively reach out based on account data

Proactivity is one of the great pillars of customer success. It holds customer relationships up by allowing CSMs to see potential issues before they happen.

Now, proactive engagement within SaaS can mean different things based on your engagement model and account specifics. The overall approach involves:

• Setting up your customer success platform to monitor account activity and identify friction points.
• Creating a trigger for your CS tool to notify you whenever those common friction points resurface for a specific customer.
• Stepping in manually or through automation to check in with the customer and make sure they’re okay and not stuck mid-product flow.

The distinction between manual engagement and automated messages varies mostly based on the engagement model and CSM workload:

• For high-touch SaaS, CSMs must step in manually and talk to the customer directly, preferably via their most common channel for communication.
• For tech-touch and low-touch, automation flows can deliver solutions in a timely manner, but you should go one step further and ask customers if they’ve actually helped them or if they require the assistance of a real person.

4. Hold very high-touch onboarding and implementation meetings

For this point on our list, you need to be in that tech-touch-to-high-touch range for your engagement model. Otherwise, it may be a waste of your time and budget to attempt it for upwards of hundreds of accounts.

However, I believe high-touch onboarding to be essential when you’re in a type of business that services very demanding customers. Similarly, that’s also the case when you have a complex product or range of services. The more your customers have to work to get to their desired outcomes, the more you should be in touch with them during the onboarding stage.

Think of it like this:

• There’s no better way to know a customer than to sit down and talk about their problems.
• If you’re there with them as an ally in those initial stages, that relationship is only going to get better.
• If you can ensure their product implementation works and serves their goals, they’ll easily turn into retained, ideally loyal customers.
• The work to optimize onboarding into a positive experience will drive up your onboarding costs. However, it will also decrease your customer retention cost by a lot, so pay close attention to the balance and always remember retention is a constant effort and cost you need to support, while onboarding only happens one time per customer.

5. Use your customer success dashboards and analytics

While customer success will get you far once it gets going, it won’t get nearly as far as it could without a proper customer success toolset. Here’s a list of the usual suspects for kickstarting your CS machine:

•  A customer success platform with customizable dashboards and weighted health scores, allowing you to monitor customer activity in a goal-conscious way.
• A comprehensive list of communications tools and channels at the ready: from email to Skype, Zoom, Slack, Discord, and anything in between. Make sure you do your research and are prepared with the appropriate channels.
• Multiple ways for customers to request support: your SaaS users need to have ways to reach out at their disposal, from a live chat on the website and other support solutions set up and activated for their accounts.
• A product tour solution for low-touch accounts: not every SaaS can afford lofty one-to-ones with customers during onboarding. For low-touch products and overextended teams, a product tour can mean the difference between your customers immediately churning and becoming loyal.
• Account tools that prevent involuntary churn: a good portion of customers that leave do so passively due to expired payment options or because they simply forgot to renew. To actively prevent this, try using an account updater tool as well as dunning emails.

6. Encourage customer reviews and read what customers are saying

Last but definitely not least, you should encourage your customers to leave reviews on platforms such as G2, Capterra, and other similar ones. That way, you’re not just attracting new clients by putting the spotlight on you and growing your online presence; you can also use that feedback (which, by and large, tends to be brutally honest) to better understand customer needs and get to work improving your product.

Even if you don’t encourage customers to leave reviews, they might do so anyway. So check common review places and even the uncommon ones. Many SaaS make the mistake of ignoring reviews that don’t come through the usual channels – such as Google Maps reviews.

Summing Up

Putting customer needs ahead of your own in SaaS is not easy. Because of our bottom line and the KPIs assigned to us, it’s easy to start with what we want and try to get the customers to help us deliver. But it’s not a good way of doing business. Instead, we should actively help customers achieve their outcomes and, by extension, complete our own goals. Successful customers will always bring in more ROI than those left to their own devices – a simple 5% increase in retention rate has been shown to drive up profits anywhere between 25% and 95% (State of Customer Messaging in 2023). So, how are you making sure your customers’ needs are heard?

Featured image by Judy Beth Morris on Unsplash

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