Over the past few weeks, a new term is making the rounds in various business news publications, and on social media: ‘Quiet Quitting’. At the risk of adding to the noise, the trend appears to be going global, and at the heart of it, it’s an issue worth addressing.
What is Quiet Quitting?
Put simply, ‘quiet quitting’ is when employees decide to put the minimum required effort into their jobs, no longer taking on additional work, or putting in more time and work in, if it’s not part of their job. Sort of like a non-unionised parallel to ‘work-to-rule’. The term appears to have been coined in a video on TikTok that went viral. According to people who comment on such things, it’s happening as a response to feelings of burnout, and to ‘hustle culture’. People, they say, are feeling as though their employers have expected too much of them for too long. They’ve put greater levels of responsibility for projects, timelines and dependencies than is warranted or fair. And employees are taking a stand (albeit a quiet one). They’re not leaving, nor are they vocally complaining, they’re simply not playing along anymore.
Why is it Happening?
If the assertion at the heart of the movement is burnout, let’s unpack that claim a bit.
Looking at the employer side of the equation first, there may in fact be some well-founded frustration. The recent pace of business – particularly in technology sectors – has been brisk, to say the least. And as any employer knows, talent has been difficult to come by. Projects don’t always stop, or even slow down, to accommodate. Employees, especially those who truly care about their work, keep giving their all. When people change jobs, the workload is often just divided among those left behind. All this considered, some companies have expected a great deal, in some cases perhaps too much, from their people.
There are two environmental factors at play, however, that have contributed to this sense of burnout. Factors that are entirely out of the control of employers.
The first is generational. It’s well-recognised that work-life balance means something different to younger generations than it did to Baby Boomers and Generation X. Younger employees, generally speaking, place their work at a different level of priority in the context of their lives overall. It’s not that they don’t care about their work, or that they’re not willing to work hard. They do, and they are. But if they don’t feel that this effort is in balance with their personal lives in the long term, they will make changes. And given the supply/demand state of the market for labour, they know they’re able to make that change.
The second factor is the reality of all our lives since the spring of 2020. We all know that life has been different, and therefore more difficult. The stress of life overall has weighed more heavily on everyone, making everything feel more difficult. Including our work. That burnout that people are feeling? It likely has just as much to do with everything outside work as within it.
What Should Employers Do?
The term ‘quiet quitting’ is getting a great deal of attention at the moment (in the same way as ‘Great Resignation’ did last year), which makes it seem like a bigger issue – or at least a more widespread one – than it really is. So for most employers, there’s no need to panic.
However, as a proactive measure, it’s worth taking a beat and considering whether your expectations of employees are realistic. As we noted in the blog on attrition and retention factors, unsustainable and unrealistic expectations are one of the attrition factors that cause employees to consider making a change. Are project milestones and deliverables dependent on people routinely working longer hours, or just generally harder, than the average employee should be expected to? If that’s the case, some changes might be in order to mitigate flight risk for employees.
More than workload alone, however, ‘quiet quitting’ is a failure of communication. By definition, it’s a result of not being willing (or feeling able) to communicate dissatisfaction in any other way. It’s an outcome of not feeling heard, feeling like no one’s listening. So make sure someone’s listening. Coach managers to check in with their staff. Make it okay for people to acknowledge feeling overloaded. Can a business always change that reality immediately, or even at all? Of course not. But when the lines of communication are open, you have the opportunity to explain why.
What Should Employees Do?
If you’re an employee thinking about ‘quiet quitting’, our advice – at the risk of being glib – is … don’t. Fashionable as it may be, this move isn’t one that will help you advance in your career. To the contrary, you may end up doing long-term damage to your growth and progression.
You don’t want to become known as an employee who only puts in the minimum required effort. Colleagues of those employees typically end up shouldering the additional weight that they drop, which doesn’t endear them to anyone. Supervisors and managers will notice, as well. At the very least, you could be putting a future positive reference in jeopardy. And at worst, you could be risking termination for cause. In future interviews, it would be very difficult to defend your decision to scale back your effort (as trendy as it may appear to be at the moment).
To be clear: this is not to say that you should be willing to put in unreasonable time or effort indefinitely. That’s not fair, nor is it sustainable. It’s just that there are better ways to deal with it. If you’re feeling this way, there are three things we recommend doing instead.
First, assume positive intent. Your manager can only help if they understand what’s going on, if they have good information on which to base their decisions. Cutting off communication is counterproductive.
Second, build your case. However possible, quantify what’s happening on the ground for you, and for your colleagues. Few managers will make course corrections based on feeling and intuition; a decision requires data. Perhaps most importantly, if things have changed markedly, compare and contrast the current reality against how things were before.
Third, communicate. Speak to your manager, sharing the case you’ve built. Ask for their help and support in solving the problem, and offer to be part of the solution.
Final Thoughts
‘Quiet quitting’ is a term that will be replaced in a few months by the next buzzword. In any trend, though, there’s a kernel of value to be found. That kernel, in this case, bears repeating: where ‘quiet quitting’ happens, it is more than anything else a failure of communication. Employers, and the employees they value, should take this cue to examine their expectations, quantify the gap between reasonable and unreasonable if and where it exists, and – above all else – communicate with each other.