Quiet quitting at work
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Quiet quitting at work
Quiet Quitting
Recently I heard the term ‘quiet quitting’ for the first time. I had no idea what it meant but apparently it relates to how people are behaving, and perceiving work and the way work needs to fit into their lifestyle.
Quiet quitting is the latest workplace phenomenon, especially for what has been termed Generation Z, those under 25. It may sound like someone is silently resigning from their post, but it actually isn’t this at all. What quiet quitting refers to is the rejection of any expectations to give more to the job than the job description requires. So no longer are people willing to go above and beyond in their job, to give more of themselves to their position or role and are fundamentally just doing the bare essentials or what I would describe, as an employer, as having staff who do just enough to not get sacked.
I find it fascinating that this is considered a new phenomenon as for the past 30 years of my career I have worked with and for so many people where meeting the bare minimum has long been the norm.
Yet what is new is how many people are now shifting to align to this attitude towards work, where many are saying ‘I don’t want to prove myself or do more to move up the corporate or work ladder,’ that they are satisfied with making a pay packet and that is all that is required; there is no desire to give more. It has now become the mentality that just turning up to work on a morning entitles them to get paid and that the employer should be grateful that they even bothered to be there.
The upshot is that more employees are strictly sticking to their job descriptions and are not prepared to work past their allocated time, even if that be 5 minutes extra to finalise dealing with a customer or a report, all in the name of avoiding burnout and to make time for things outside of work.
The Issue of Quiet Quitting
You may ask why this would be an issue and surely this is considered a good thing if it means people can better manage their lives as, after all, we deserve to have a work-life balance. From a career perspective it may work in the short term, particularly in the current climate given the hiring challenges many businesses are facing, and while an employee may feel it gives them better balance by not going the extra mile, eventually lower performance-related incentives and reduced opportunities for other roles or career progression are the likely outcome.
In a society where we expect instant gratification and to be able to have it all, quiet quitting certainly makes sense. Why would I do more than I am paid to do, why would I go above and beyond if I don’t need to and I know that my boss is going to find it hard to replace me, not because of my skills and what I bring to the role but essentially due to the fact that finding new hires in the current job market is proving extremely difficult.
It seems the days are gone where employees care about the business and what happens within it and that no number of perks or company culture is capable of engaging them, as people are now working to live a life they desire rather than working to enjoy work, be fulfilled within the role, and aspiring to bring more to their careers.
What is increasingly obvious is that the young workforce is overall increasingly disengaged and that, across-the-board, people are not wanting to give as much time or energy to work.
There is nothing wrong with working to rules and not allowing yourself to be taken advantage of by an employer, but this is very different to having mentally quit your job or having one foot already out the door or perhaps only ever having had one foot in it while you work.
There is a fine line between saying I will do my job but no more and being mentally or emotionally checked out of the job altogether.
If someone has reduced their engagement to the bare minimum they need to not get fired, the chances are they’re already uninspired and need to move on, for what impact does it have on co-workers and the office or work environment when it is clear someone is not giving their all.
I have worked with people who do just enough to not get fired, I have employed several of them too, where you can’t fault them in their job as they get the task done, if at times only barely just, as the way it is done is painfully slow, unproductive, and often unenthusiastic.
These are the type of workers who are loathe to embrace change or new initiatives and will push back if they believe what is being asked or introduced will mean they have to step up, put in more effort or work harder during the day. Even if this is an unspoken attitude it impacts the team and all those they come into contact with as it can be felt that they are only there for the pay-packet and are not willing to muck in or pick up the slack when deadlines approach or things take an unexpected turn and all hands on deck are required.
The old ways of working where we were pushing beyond and being driven, ending up taking work home, or putting work ahead of everything else, where we championed the workaholic, are and have been proven to be unhealthy and detrimental. Hence the high levels of executive stress, burnout, and early retirement; especially those due to ill health that have been witnessed. Yet this backlash or swing to the other end of the work spectrum could also be as detrimental, if not more, to our overall sense of wellbeing, worth and vitality.
We Are Designed to Work
We are designed to work; we are fabricated at our very core to give back and to be of service. Societally we work so we do not become a burden on the system or reliant on handouts. It now appears, in the post/mid-Covid era, that we are being pushed towards a lifestyle of government handouts and social credit stipend type systems where people are being paid not to work.
Imagine a working dog breed, highly trained and naturally keen to do what is instinctive for it, laying on the couch all day, eating junk food and binge-watching Netflix while the flock of sheep, for example, that it is meant to be herding goes neglected. That dog would soon be bored and would be seeking stimulation, leading to poor and even destructive behaviours and habits while the sheep left untended have scattered to the four corners of the farm leaving the farmer to try and manage the demands of sheep husbandry alone. Eventually the dog having no purpose and outlet would become despondent and depressed and withdraw or give up on life.
It is no different for us – as I said we are designed to work and without work we lose our sense of direction and purpose in life, our self-worth suffers, and we turn to entertainment, distraction and stimulation to try and fill the gap. Many studies show that the long-term unemployed suffer from mental health issues and depression as life has no point to it and becomes flat and mundane.
One only has to look at the last two years under Covid restrictions where many people were furloughed or working from home to see the increase in alcohol and food delivery consumption as well as the increase in streamed TV subscriptions and usage. Many of these workers reported feeling down and having no sense of identity and worth and whilst at first, they enjoyed working from home, many said they missed the social interactivity and dynamism of being in the office, rising to challenges and putting in a proper day’s work and having a sense of productivity and contribution.
The Impact of Quiet Quitting on the Workplace
The issue with quiet quitting is that it has detrimental impacts on the quality of the workplace environment and team morale, impacting on the company culture and productivity, with a worker who is taking up space and a pay packet, significantly underperforming but claiming they are fulfilling their job description. This becomes a HR nightmare and one that is very difficult to performance manage or apply disciplinary action to as technically, they are adhering to their position description. Is the solution simply then for employers to write better and more comprehensive job descriptions and include a clause that basically stipulates ‘and anything else I say’ as part of that description?
Ok, that might work for example if a worker pushes back on a task, like say emptying the rubbish bin, but how does it cover for the fact that they are only minimally productive, costing the company time and money and undermining morale and not stepping up to the plate and simply getting paid for attendee-ism? Reading about quiet quitting online and what solutions are available, thus far everything that I have come across puts the onus back on the workplace, the team leaders and managers, providing advice that the boss should be the one adjusting and making all the changes to accommodate their workers – essentially pandering to the demands of their staff rather than having the staff meet the requirements of the job that they have contractually agreed to do.
When it comes to employee, where is their responsibility and what do they need to change to reach not only the duties of the job description but to also have a high-performance standard? How do they go about meeting the expectations of the business and perhaps even exceeding them?
Is being distracted, moody, withdrawn, slow, minimally productive now acceptable, and should employers drop their standards and expectations to keep their workforce happy? I would categorically say no, that we should strive to uphold standards and working conditions that are reasonable and acceptable, and in return an employee works to those standards, KPIs and targets.
No, we do not want burnt-out, exhausted people in our workplaces but blaming work for the way you feel about life isn’t always accurate and shifts the spotlight of the true underlying causes of discontentment and disharmony that end up draining your vitality and lifeforce so that it becomes perceived, or perhaps easier, to point the finger and say work is the problem.
If you simply withdraw, give up and decide to quietly quit, and by the way it is not so quiet to your boss or co-workers, you miss the opportunity to grow and thrive in your existing job and in doing so you are resigning yourself to the fact that work lacks purpose, or isn’t enjoyable. Burnout isn’t caused by overwork; it is caused by not having meaning in your work.
And herein lies the shift, both for the employee and the employer to look at work beyond being a contractual exchange of hours worked in return for a set rate of pay and to understand the purpose of the work itself beyond working for a good cause or for the sense of belonging and teamwork – yes, these are valuable and have great merit but there is something that goes beyond that.
What Is the Purpose of Work?
What if I were to say to you that work is an opportunity: an opportunity to bring all that you are, all your natural gifts and innate talents, and to reflect those to others. That work is the opportunity for you to share your lived quality and to see and be inspired by the lived quality of others. That through the activity of work you are exposed to life and relationships outside of your family and friendship groups and because of that it provides you the opportunity to learn through others, and to bring up and out and hence resolve life’s hurts and issues. That work is an essential part of our development and schooling in life and can be a source of giving back, of being in service and true purpose – which in fact is what all human life is about.
When we compartmentalise life into work, family, relationships, me time, down time, holidays and fun times, the emphasis of one aspect being more important or more enjoyable than another means that the way we live is full of inconsistency, where we will give more to one part of life than another. We live in a yo-yo effect of being engaged and involved in one facet of life and being switched off or resentful in another and hence we go through life quiet quitting on the parts that we don’t like or allocate to being of lesser value or importance.
It is this subtle, normalised way of being where we live quitting on parts of our life and thus parts of ourselves that lead to the disenchantment with work as we are looking for that ‘something’ to fulfil us and fill the void and emptiness that being disconnected from our wholeness leaves behind.
Could the key to having purpose and being productive at work boil down to being more engaged in life and with ourselves as a whole; to know and realise that as a being we are more than only human, birthed from the qualities of our Soul and God and the vast intelligence that makes up the Universe and that indeed we are Universal, innately wise and loving beings. That it is through connection to our Universality that brotherhood and the lived quality of purpose come to the fore.
Long before we quietly quit on work, we quietly quit on ourselves succumbing to a model of life that has us believe that a) we are only human and b) that we only have one life i.e., that you live and then you die and that’s it, game over and c) that you are rewarded and acknowledged for what you do rather than what you are.
What if our job description was to bring all of whom and what we truly are to every aspect of life for the benefit and evolution of all? What then? Would we want to quietly quit, or would we want to roll up our sleeves and get on with it?
Filed under
Responsibility, Work life balance, Work stress
