# Workplace Surgery: Reigniting your top performers

- **Episode:** [166](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/166.md) (2025-01-28)
- **Type:** workplace-surgery
- **Tags:** workplace-surgery, top-performers, motivation
- **Time:** 43:22–48:12 (start 2602s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/166?t=2602](https://truthliesandwork.com/166?t=2602)

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[43:22] Leanne Elliott: What else you got, Al? Who else did we get letters from this week?
[43:25] Al Elliott: Well, here we go. My best performers are turning into robots. How do I bring back their spark? So this person writes, as a manager of a team, I'm seeing worrying signs that some of my previously high performers are doing the bare minimum. No one's explicitly slacking, but there's a noticeable drop in initiative and enthusiasm. We've had good retention and our engagement scores were strong last quarter, but something feels off. I'm seeing less participation in meetings, slower email responses, and people sticking rigidly to their job descriptions. 3 of my best people haven't contributed a single new idea in months. How do I address this without making accusations or driving people away? Lee, I've got this in the back of my head, one of the bullshit— no, you can't say that word— one of the, one of the bingo words you said. Was it quiet quitting?
[44:13] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, it sounds like a classic case of quiet quitting, doesn't it? And quiet quitting is usually Some kind of self-protective tactic against burnout. Sounds like your people have been working hard and at a high level for a long time, and you've benefited from that in terms of low turnover and high performance, but ultimately that energy is going to have an impact. So yeah, it sounds like that's the case. You've got some quiet quitting, some potential early signs of burnout happening in your team. I think you need to flip the question rather than kind of looking at, people to blame or reprimand, kind of going, well, what can I change about the current environment that might support people with their, with their well-being and their resilience whilst being able to maintain levels of performance? And that usually comes down to one of two things. It actually comes down to resources. It's, it's— there's only 6 things you can do to build an awesome workplace culture, maybe 7 arguably, but there's, there's one called resources. And this is the number one thing that always comes out with any organization I work with who are struggling. With quiet quitting or burnout, and that's because there's not enough people contributing to the work and the workload's too high. And I understand it's like, oh, well, that's just the way it is, particularly in small businesses. Yeah, but what's gonna happen is you're gonna go through these periods where you have very high performance, and then you're gonna have lots of high turnover, and then you'll go through the cycle again, and that ultimately slows down growth massively, whereas sustaining at a level that is manageable, It's much more effective for long-term success and growth of your business. The other thing to think about in terms of resources is that sometimes it can be helped by improved processes, streamlined processes, less red tape, less bureaucracy, more autonomy within people's role. Role, that's another way you can create an awesome workplace culture. Are people going above and beyond to their detriment? Are they stepping on toes? Is there some infighting because, you know, they've been contributing these ideas in ways that their colleagues might not feel is appropriate. There's some investigation to do here. If last quarter your engagement levels were high, that seems that either if you do it again this quarter, you're going to see a significant drop, or depending on the tool you're using, you're not measuring what you think it is you're measuring. A lot of employee engagement tools, I won't mention any, Gallup, might think more about a focus on employee satisfaction than employee engagement necessarily
[46:33] Al Elliott: Yeah
[46:34] Leanne Elliott: It depends on the science you follow and how you want to use the data. So I think, I think some more investigation needs to be done. I would recommend looking at a predictive model of engagement, a survey like the RX7 or other similar ones out there, the HSE management standards we talk about a lot, that's completely free. And make sure you're actually measuring employee engagement and not employee satisfaction, because they're 2 very different things with 2 very different outcomes
[46:57] Al Elliott: I think it's good because you said something, let me just see this, how do I address this without making accusations? So you're clearly thinking in the right way. But it does sound to me like, again, I'm not shilling our own product here, but it does sound to me like your engagement survey is measuring the wrong thing. Because to go from Q4 to Q1, such massive changes in employee behaviour, just doesn't sound quite right to me. So, drop it, right, if you're listening to this, which I hope you are, drop Leanne an email, send her the tool you're doing and the results if you want. She'll look through them. I'm sorry, I'm going given you more work either, but I'm sure she'll look through them and she'll tell you what she thinks. Are you ready for question number 3, or anything else to add on question number 2?
[47:36] Leanne Elliott: The only thing I'd add is don't feel bad. There's so many organizations that do use what are branded as employee engagement surveys and aren't really. I had a client that I worked with once that I said to them, oh, maybe that it might be a case that employee engagement is suffering a little bit, and he was like, oh, well, my results were really great last Cool, they're in their 8% plus. I was like, cool, what was your turnover rate? And he's like, 50%. I was like, um, yeah, no. Um, so it's really common, um, and it's really just about making sure you've got— like all things, isn't it? It's like if you've got a CRM, you want to make sure it's, it's the right one. Um, anyway, that's all I have to say on that