ChildCare Conversations with Kate and Carrie

Episode 119: Quiet Quitting

September 27, 2022 Carrie Casey and Kate Woodward Young
ChildCare Conversations with Kate and Carrie
Episode 119: Quiet Quitting
Show Notes Transcript

Knowing your workforce and your boundries are very important. In this weeks episode, Carrie and Kate go through Quiet Firing and Quiet Quitting. These are important to know as both a childcare director and teacher! 

Support the show

Thanks for Listening 🎙


Welcome back, Carrie and I are so glad to see you here. And so today, we are going to continue to do some more rambling, having a conversation about hiring and firing but specifically, we are going to talk about quiet quitting and quiet firing. They've now added quiet firing to the list. 


Oh lovely. Okay, all right. Well let's start with, we're going to go backwards here because I have no idea what that means.. So why don't you just give us a kickoff carry real quick and introduce me to the concept of quiet firing because that one I haven't heard of before.


My understanding is that quiet firing is basically what I would do to people when I wanted them to quit, so cutting their hours back and stuff like that. So that the person decides to quit and it doesn't affect your unemployment, okay. 


So now that we've got the definition, creating a work environment where somebody wants to quit instead of actually firing them. So you have  got to define quite quitting. If I had to define quiet firing.


I'm quite ready to define quiet quitting. So quiet quitting is less about people actually quitting their job, it's more about everybody kind of going, "you hired me for 40 hours or these are the hours that you hired me for and only work in those hours”. So not answering emails, text messages on the weekends, in the evenings, not doing something, that's above, and beyond their job description. Which are things that as directors,  we know we find ourselves often in the other duties as assigned. 


Well, we are, we have a Covid created, a whole generation of and and this is less about I think an age or  generation. but more people who worked during the last couple of years in remote settings and non-traditional work formats are finding that flexibility is more important to them and sometimes it's more important than money. Sometimes  it's more important than a lot of other things. We used it as an incentive when we were hiring. 



And I think it's also about setting boundaries, because they were somebody Bosses who had the idea of? Well, if you have your work computer at home, I can communicate with you about work at any time. So I think that was part of it too. But the whole remote work thing, doesn't really apply a huge amount to childcare. But I did have, in one of my groups, someone basically a director who was responding to what was to me pretty. Obviously a quiet quitting statement which was they had a new hire. 


Somebody who'd been with them for less than a quarter sent them a text message saying I expect to be paid as the Lead Teacher for these four hours that I was in the room without the Lead Teacher because I was hired on as an assistant, not as a Lead Teacher. 

And then everybody in the chat was just, you know, blowing it up and going, you know, you just need to tell her bye. Bye. Sally. And my response was, this is a quiet quitting situation. She felt like she was being asked to do more than her responsibilities and that is a failure of your orientation. 


And it says the class was half the size it normally was. She had a lesson plan. That was prepared by the Lead Teacher, the Lead Teacher, this was a scheduled vacation day so she wasn't doing any of the Lead Teacher job except being the only adult in the room. 


So I think that's where it would come up for childcare if people were capable. I think another component that would fall into the quiet quitting would be. Even though you've hired them, for a specific shift or specific time slot, which hopefully was very clear in your job description. And your hiring process is them coming back and well, now they want these days off and now they want to be able to come in at this time. 


Maybe not necessarily quite quitting, but it is that flexibility that we were able to give to people during Covid because again rooms were different sizes. And oh, you're right. I mean a lot of people in our industry didn't necessarily Go Remote but a lot of administrative staff did go remote people who were trainers or staff trainers or people, those who even did orientation For organizations all of the curriculum adult development folks. Pretty much went virtual so The virtual piece is still there but I think it's more of that definitely that flexibility they're looking for for you to be flexible and if because a lot of us haven't necessarily been able to give raises so if you have somebody's been with you for a long time and you have been able to give them a raise. So they're trying to basically say well since I haven't gotten a raise, I want flexibility in my schedule. Yeah. 


I think we can do some of that and I think we also need to be very clear with this whole quiet quitting thing being in the Zeitgeist of talking to staff, about what is the role of a Lead Teacher of a mentor teacher or an assistant in the classroom so that people don't have this conflict. Like, the person in my group who was like, I was functioning as Lead Teacher, hmm. No, you were functioning as a caregiver of six children. That's not necessarily A Lead Teacher. So you've got to be much more clear about the job titles and what additional responsibilities come with them. The other thing I get really mad about is I get really mad about people bosses expecting their employees to work nights and weekends without compensation. 


It makes me super super mad because I as a boss was like if we're going to have a staff meeting, I try and it was going to be more than an hour. I tried to schedule it on a week that we had one day off. So I would schedule it Memorial Day week, Labor Day week, Martin Luther King day that week. 


So if we were going to spend an extra four hours on Saturday, you would have had Monday off. So you still Oh, got a two-day weekend. You just didn't necessarily get a three day weekend. Maybe you got a two and a half, but I never expected my staff to work nights and weekends without compensation. And you pointed out that a lot of School District employees are expected to work outside of their work hours. 


And I think there is some of that, but again, it doesn't have to be how you structure your class. Okay. We're going to, you know, I had a lot of teachers when I was in high school that we're like, okay you're going, you know, grade 2 or period to is grading, period ones homework, you know assignments. 


I mean that doesn't necessarily work now. Nowadays it definitely wouldn't work in a preschool class. Yeah, it doesn't work in a preschool classroom, but, but and the reason I bring that up, is because we do have a fair amount of folks, that listen to us who work in a head start, or some sort of even is debased and they're paid hourly right or their pick for X number of hours. 


And yes, this is we generally get this a lot when we are working with folks who are privately run programs. And so those privately around programs probably have people checking in and check it out. And they may not be not going to say school districts necessarily put people on salary because that's not really what they kind of put them on a flat rate and you think about somebody who came to your program perhaps from a Traditional School background. So, maybe they were a kindergarten teacher or even a first grade teacher, they may assume that there are now the Lead Teacher of the Pre-K. So they're expected to do their lesson plans in the evening at home. Because there's not necessarily a planning period, because we know that school districts right now, those planning periods are now expected to be when they do everything else. 


I think there's definitely a problem in the school districts because of so many teachers quitting. Okay, this is your planning period. So you're going to cover Miss Miss Jones's class and you're like, excuse me, what am I supposed to do? My lesson planning, what am I supposed to grade? My papers? 


I think that is a huge problem for school districts and they're going to lose more teachers because they're not letting their teachers work through what  is called work to work to rule. So they're basically forcing people to work more hours than they are contracted for. And I think that's a huge problem and in child care, we need to help our staff. Set boundaries and not give their phone number out to parents, so that parents aren't calling and texting them outside of work hours. 


And quiet firing. I don't think this is a new phenomenon as you've been doing it for decades. There are employees who are no longer a good fit for your program, but they haven't necessarily done something that you want to rock the boat of. 


All of the rest of your staff by firing them. They haven't gotten to the point where it's making other people uncomfortable, but it has gotten to the point where you have realized this person is no longer a good fit for your program. So if they're not a good fit for your program anymore, but they are not, you know, inconveniencing the rest of your staff or gossiping a whole bunch or something like that. Just don't give them as many hours because they're not a good fit so you don't want them in your program for 40 hours a week. A week, if they're not a good fit in your program for 40 hours a week. 


So quiet, quitting. Should be a conversation. Quiet firing. Should be a conversation. I don't want it to be super quiet because if I'm firing that person, if I'm quietly firing them with quotes. I probably had a conversation with them and I said, you don't seem to be happy here. 


And if they denied it, their behavior did not go along with that denial. And they kept coming in late to work, sitting on their rear end the entire time. They're on shift asking, if they can take a nap in the break room, those kinds of things. I am going to go ahead and reduce their hours and I may not say I'm reducing your hours because you're not fitting in. But I have had the conversation where I said, you don't seem to be happy here and it's affecting your work. 


So if there is going to be a cop, there should be a conversation but it doesn't have to be direct for those who are like me and somewhat conflict avoidant. You've given them a heads up that you think that there's a problem. 


So it's really important especially if you've got and then childcare. We often have people who work multiple positions And so we've talked a little bit about making sure that people are really clear what a lead teacher's role is and what a teacher's role is. But you know, there have been times where we've had people substitute as a teacher, but maybe they were somebody who we originally hired as a bus driver or as a cook or some other role. And so we have to make sure that we are being respectful there too, because again, if we hire them at one pay rate and all of a sudden they're working a whole lot of hours in these, you know, No other part-time things. 


We trained them to do but not really hired them for again, that's another one of those respects things. I think it's just as important, you're definitely going to have employees who love that diversity in their job and that love that flexibility in their job. Really. It's all about communication. 


Yeah. And there you know if you have QuickBooks for your payroll or you're using a DP or something like that, you can literally put in five different pay rates for that. Person who is your jack-of-all-trades and when they're a substitute in a classroom, they get paid as a substitute. And when they are driving a bus, they get paid as the bus driver. And when they are mopping your floors, they get paid the mopping, the floors rate, you can have multiple different pay rates for an individual person in most software, and most Payroll Services. 


But make sure you tell people so if somebody comes in and they get paid and I'm going to say, they get paid more as a substitute than maybe they do by mopping the floor. Make sure they're clear about mopping the floor at this rate and this is this rate regardless of how you do your payroll. 


Please, please, please, make sure that all your staff. Now how to go look at a paycheck stub that your paycheck stubs are detailed and will actually tell them oh 4 hours you know mopping floors 6 hours bus driving, 12 hours substitute, they should be able to see very clearly. What they were paid for, how many hours for the work that they did, and they need to be paid for all the time they worked. If you don't, you are stealing from them. And that is a federal crime, it's called wage theft. And that's again what a lot like what the school districts are doing with those teachers, they should be paying those. Jurors over time. I know that they're salaried but they still are working more than 40 hours every week and they are according to the current federal overtime guidelines. They should be being paid overtime. 


So we don't want to be doing the bad things that the school districts are currently doing. Please pay your staff for all the time that they're working. Be very clear when you're asking them to do something outside of their General parameters. If this is a, we're trying you out for a promotion or if this is your covering somebody's rear end because we've got an illness going through or whatever, be clear. And don't just write somebody off because they say something that you interpret as quiet quitting 


All right. Well Carrie, thank you so much for taking the time with with us today and kind of having this discussion, because I think that we both have seen a lot of our directors and the last maybe even just a month that is backed up, you know, I don't go back to school, but they're back to school. They're back to hiring and they're back to training and sometimes we just do things really, fast and so hopefully y'all got something out of today's conversation and we look forward to seeing you soon.