There’s a trend sweeping social media and some offices where employees are quitting “the idea of going above and beyond at work,” as TikTok user @zaidleppelin said in July. That post has gotten more than 3 million posts and helped to popularize the term “quiet quitting.”
Employment specialists say that quiet quitting is just a new term for an old concept: employee disengagement. It comes on the heels of the “Great Resignation” that occurred after the re-opening of the economy that was shuttered by the pandemic. There are many offices that never got back to full strength because of so many people moving on — 4 million a month at the height of it — and this has led to high rates of burnout from those who stayed behind.
The entire concept of “work” has been turned on its head, and quiet quitting is just one-way employees are demonstrating their unhappiness with current conditions.
“If some one is giving their best in 40 hours and then want to spend rest of time for living isn’t terming/labeling that behavior quiet quitting derogatory?” a HomeAway employee asked earlier this week on Blind, an anonymous corporate messaging board.
“Quiet quitting: doing what you’re paid for,” one Palantir employee responded.
But whatever the definition, the goal is the same: untangling employees’ identities from their jobs and leaving them with more time and energy to invest elsewhere.
Part of it is definitely generational. But there’s also a general feeling that there’s more to life than work. Not just kids and spouses, but finding time for other interests as well. And this plays into the resistance that employers are still getting about employees returning to the office.
One of the signs of quiet quitting is complaints coming from other employees who are forced to work harder because their colleague has become disengaged.
“It may also show up as complaints from colleagues about the silently quitting employee,” Grasso said. “Colleagues may feel frustrated by having to pick up the slack or feeling shut out.”
These signs “should sound alarms for any manager to intervene quickly,” Grasso warned.
“Much like quiet quitting is becoming a trend on social media, it could also become an infectious attitude in the workplace as employees start to compare notes and recognize that they are having similar experiences about work taking more than it’s giving.”
Michelle Hay, global chief people officer at Sedgwick, a business solutions firm, told the Post that quiet quitting “speaks to the tired and frustrated feeling that many are experiencing on the tail end of the pandemic,” Hay said. “People are reassessing their priorities, and social disconnection can be part of this shift.”
No, this is not the end of western civilization. But it’s definitely a “quiet revolution” that will sort itself out eventually. The bottom line is that people want to be paid more for doing less. That doesn’t work very well unless you belong to a union. And once that becomes clear, unionization will become far more common and companies — as they were forced to do 100 years ago when the labor movement first took off — will have to match the salary and benefits that unions are offering to compete for workers.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member