Posted on 08/24/2022 8:27:24 AM PDT by Brookhaven
Move over rage quitting, “quiet quitting” is the latest workplace phenomenon.
It may sound like the act of someone silently resigning, but it actually refers to the rejection of “hustle culture” — the expectation to go above and beyond in your job, rather than simply doing the requirements of the job.
It’s a term that has gained traction since a wave of TikTok posts recently emerged from people who consider themselves quiet quitters. TikTok creator Zaid Khan, @zkchillin, posted on TikTok about his own discovery of the term in late July — a video that went viral. In the video he described quiet quitting as “not outright quitting your job, but quitting the idea of going above and beyond.”
But what exactly is quiet quitting, what’s inspired it and what does it signal for how Gen Z shows up at work in the long term? Here’s an explainer.
What is quiet quitting? Going above and beyond simply meeting the bare minimum requirements of a job has long been the working norm. This supercharged work ethic — dubbed hustle culture — has been a way workers have made themselves stand out to their employers, and over time has become standard.
But like most things in the world of work — this too is now being upended.
It might be because of the great resignation trend, which empowered employees to demand more from their work experiences and work-like balance. But it’s also likely a byproduct of the psychological fallout from living through the coronavirus pandemic, and the subsequent burnout that affected millions.
Regardless, giving 110% is out the door because workers want to avoid exhaustion and ditch stressful jobs that expect them to do more than what’s in their job description. And it’s Generation Z workers — those aged up to 24 years old — who seem the keenest to embrace it.
“The generational influences that were paused during the two years of Covid are now back and they have accelerated because of the options that this workforce has,” said Joe Galvin, chief research officer at Vistage, a CEO coaching and peer advisory organization. “The generational drivers behind that place value on things more so than just career, income, career, income.”
The result is that more employees are strictly sticking to their job descriptions and aren’t staying on the clock past 5 p.m. in an effort to avoid burnout and make time for things outside of work.
“It’s an important message to amplify that we’re all deserving of having a work-life balance and for work to not be all consuming and inflicting so much stress upon us,” Khan, who works as an engineer, told WorkLife. “I thought there must be people out there who feel the same way. Going above and beyond at a company, they won’t remember the effort you put in a few years down the line, but what you will remember is those sleepless nights you had. Why can’t you shift that focus to prioritizing your life and your hobbies and nurturing more of the things that matter?”
Khan said he’s made a personal shift to make sure he has the time and energy for things outside of work. But that doesn’t mean he will slack off during his work hours, he stressed.
“In essence what this quiet quitting movement is reinforcing is that doing just your job is enough,” said Khan.
Deloitte Global’s “2022 Gen Z and Millennial” survey found that these generations are striving for balance and advocating for change like never before. The report revealed that good work-life balance and learning and development opportunities were the top priorities for respondents when choosing an employer. It also showed that 45% of Gen Zers feel burned out due to their work environment and 44% have left jobs due to workload pressure.
“Your worth as a person is not defined by your labor,” said Khan in his TikTok, which received nearly 500,000 likes and was viewed over 3 million times.
The Deloitte survey found that 40% of Gen Zers would like to leave their job within two years, and 35% would leave without having another job lined up.
Cathy Acratopulo, co-founder of HR consultancy Lace Partners, said that given the hiring challenges most businesses are facing, employers may find it’s easier to take the productivity hit and retain someone who’s operating at minimum levels than carry the cost of job vacancies.
That said, it’s not something employees are likely to be rewarded for either. “While an employee may feel quietly quitting helps them to achieve a better balance in the short term by not going the extra mile at work, the likelihood is they will be impacted by lower performance-related incentives and reduced opportunities for alternative roles and progression,” said Acratopulo.
So is quiet quitting a new concept? Not entirely. But it’s only now gaining real steam. The pandemic has shifted how people — across all generations — think about their work-life balance. According to PwC’s “Global Workforce Hopes and Fears” survey, one in five workers worldwide plans to quit their job in 2022.
Meanwhile, Gallup’s “State of the Global Workforce 2022” report found there is a 21% global employee engagement rate. In the U.S. and Canada, it’s up to 33%, however 50% of workers experience daily stress and 41% experience daily worry. In the U.K., only 9% of workers are engaged or enthusiastic about work.
And yet, while all generations have reassessed their work-life balance, Gen Zers are known to have radically different views from all older generations when it comes to careers and how to define success in life and in the workforce. So the quiet quitting movement is likely to take hold in this generation especially.
More than 4,300 comments were made on Khan’s TikTok video post, including: “I do just enough to not get fired or noticed,” “I did this when I asked for a raise and they told me no,” “I’ve changed my work motto to ‘strive to be mediocre,'” “my above and beyond requires an above and beyond salary,” and “that’s how normal work should be.” Others admitted participating in quiet quitting for years already.
What is Gen Z saying? “Gen Z is less afraid to speak up and be vocal about this,” said Khan, 24. “We are realizing that our overworking — we don’t see that leading us down the same fruitful path as it did for older generations. Some of my friends and I joke that we’ll never be able to afford a house. Gen Z have this fire under their bellies that something needs to change.”
Twenty-four-year-old Rebecca (a pseudonym WorkLife agreed to) who works at an environmental consultancy in New York told WorkLife that she now only does what her job description outlined after she spent her first year there doing tasks that weren’t discussed during the interview process.
“The most important thing for me is work-life balance,” she said. “If they expect me to not have a life outside of work or lose sleep or sacrifice my breaks or free time or have my hair fall out from stress it will never be worth it.”
While millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) began to bring some change to the workforce, she finds that some of her millennial colleagues or bosses still have the mindset of a boomer (born between 1946 and 1964) that working hard will pay off.
“I think Gen Z has realized that our time outside of work and our mental health will always take priority and going above and beyond for a company that doesn’t do that for you is not worth it,” Rebecca said.
“We’ve seen a shift for requests by millennials and Gen Zs prior to Covid,” said Vistage’s Galvin. “They were requests, now they’re demands. The reason they can demand it is because the employment market, despite having cooled, it’s only now red hot.”
The power that Gen Z holds in the workforce could be the same reason that they’re able to partake in quiet quitting to steer clear of burnout and ensure they have a work-life balance. Gen Z will account for 30% of the workforce by 2030.
“You see more boomers every day stepping out, fewer [generation] Xs [born between 1965 and 1980] ready to step up, and the millennials and the Zs are now the dominant numbers in the workforce,” said Galvin.
Galvin said that Vistage is focused on developing managerial competencies, coaching capabilities and leadership disciplines so that veteran workers can truly manage the new millennial and Gen Z workforce.
So rather than adopting this quiet quitting, should an employee just talk to their employer about how they feel? Yes. In theory, if an employee is quietly quitting it’s likely a sign that they should appeal to their boss or move on from their role.
However, the young workforce is overall increasingly disengaged.
“I couldn’t care less about what happens to my company,” said Rebecca. “This is a resume builder for me to go into something that actually helps our climate and environment and doesn’t care about profit.”
While some Gen Zers might do more with better compensation, this generation cares more than ever about whether their company is making a difference. According to the Deloitte study, only 18% of Gen Zers and 16% of millennials believe their employers are strongly committed to fighting climate change. Rebecca said her perspective would change on the effort she puts into a job if she felt she was making a positive difference to good causes.
She plans to quit by the end of this year, and won’t necessarily line up another job beforehand.
The quiet quitting phenomenon may signpost how employers need to prioritize different qualities when hiring new employees, like being a curious individual. Building a talent pipeline of professionals who are curious, love learning and are motivated might help avoid creating a staff of quiet quitters.
“We really need to find people that are a good cultural fit who are motivated to learn,” Stacey Force, ManpowerGroup’s innovation strategist and vp of product marketing, told WorkLife last week.
Lace partners’ Acratopulo suggested employers try to prevent quiet quitting by taking the employee pulse regularly to understand how people are feeling and to track engagement. By doing this, an employer could either encourage the employee who is quiet quitting, or ensure they move on to a role that they really want to do.
Pat Ashworth, director of learning solutions at AdviserPlus, recommends that human resource departments focus on how to empower managers with data and tools to identify issues early and deal with underperformance effectively.
“Employee engagement is more than routine one-to-ones and work-focused check-ins; it’s about making employees feel valued and recognized for who they are so that they have a more emotional connection to the organization,” said Ashworth. “Enabling managers to focus on building more personal relationships and empathy with their teams should help to avoid widespread issues of employee disengagement.”
see my #100
Many years ago I worked at a certain company. My first year there I worked my tail off. I asked after a year what the odds were of getting a promotion/ raise. I was told that our government customers told the company that there were too many white males in management so white males like me were not eligible.
The next year, I put in the minimum. If a customer had an issue, at 5pm I would get up and go home and deal with it the next day. I finally switched to another job paying considerably more money, where working hard was rewarded.
If working hard is not rewarded, it makes more sense to put in the minimum.
There was a local center-right conservative radio talk show host the other day that was talking about quiet quitting.. He said there’s another word for them. He called them ‘losers’. When you get in there to do your job, you’re supposed to do the best you can for the money you make not just stuff off your job.
Nobody can afford to fire people these days. Employers are happy if they can get people just to show up for work, let alone go the extra mile.
lol...this is not new for sure. But I do think its got exponentially worse with normalizing the large scale ‘work from home’ dynamic.
Newsflash: They don't. Any company that says, "Our people are our most important asset!" is lying through their teeth.
They'll close up shop and move overseas at a moment's notice once the decision is made that there's a short-term benefit to the bottom line.
Now we are trying to rehire some of those people and there is no more talk anymore about those stupid vaxxes.
Boomers are setting the example. Lots of them are coasting their way to retirement. So we have a situation where the old guys don’t pitch in more than they have to and hound guys don’t do much more than show up, if they show up.
I’ve known at least one or two people like this everyplace I’ve worked. Some are actually pretty good at it. Some will chat up the boss every time they’re around. That 15 minute conversation was 15 minutes they didn’t have to work and they wouldn’t get in trouble for talking to the boss. Some people would be moving all day but not really produce anything. Lots of walking but no production. Some worked very hard at not working.
When I’d be giving a tour and someone would ask, “How many people work here?”, my stock answer was, “About half.”
I should have read all the comments before posting mine. Might have expected that old classic.
I’m a mid-boomer and frankly, I don’t fault the attitude of these kids. Much of what they have become is learned from watching their parents and grand parents marched from the workplace after giving all they could. That is at the heart of it I’d say.
We worked our asses off in many cases because there were so many of us and the workforce was so competitive. Cut-throat competitive. By the 90s most of the fat was gone and the cuts were to the bone and beyond. I was an engineer and manager in the upstream oil industry. I survived at least 20 years of down cycle in a 42 year career. The shrinkage and competition of US industry began with offshoring jobs and that just expanded from blue collar to white collar.
I wish I had a nickel for every time my wife brought clothes to me at the office and I did a spit bath and shaved in the sink after pulling an all-nighter to be ready for something someone thought was vital that day. I wish I had another nickel for all the times I went for a week at at time without ever seeing the house in daylight and coming home too tired to do much more than eat a bite and go to bed to get ready for the next day that started at 0500. I can tell you now, tell everybody now, the only part of all that which was ever remembered is by my family and me. In addition to this I can tell you the world is pareto, as a friend used to say. 20% of us did 80% of the useful and necessary work. For that we may have gotten trinkets and the rest was the same as everybody else.
We also lived to see executive compensation rise to astronomical multiples of the line and management. Some worked these hours we did, most didn’t. I know, I serviced the board room. We stayed long after they left and came to work early to see them file into the parking garage after we had been at work a very long time. Truly, nobody actually “earns” that kind of compensation. It is arranged by the incest of boards and compensation committees in a self-gratifying circle jerk club. Read a few 10-Ks on the matter and tell me I’m wrong.
After 20 years they attempted to escort me out the door, I did not let them, I left taking none of their handouts and started a business. I got paid for all my long hours then. Going it on your own is very hard, you have no real idea how much there is you have to do and how many are out to get you. Some of us have written books but they just don’t get the point across of how hard going it alone can be. Maybe my example is much different, I did it because I had to. I had stayed for reasons most would never understand, lets just say it was like a mink lined outhouse and I was risk adverse until forced.
Bitter? Yes, for being so stupid. This is one area that Gen Z is right about. I played the game thinking all it took was hard work and smarts, it takes other elements I was not willing to give. Servile, prostitution and betrayal of morals, ethic and principle are not in me. Now, I would either quit quiet or go my own way and get paid for my hard work as an independent. There is more risk as an independent, much more, but there can be much more reward and certainly more satisfaction when you get over the amount of work it takes to succeed.
As short as good labor is today I’d be on my own and on a campaign of rape and pillage only for a fee. I would not take what they dish out in corpocracy.
The military is no different than corpocracy. There is a reason most good guys never make O-6 and hardly any good guys who do go any further than that.
Senior moment,
I saw ‘Revalation’ and
‘AntiChrist’, put 2 and 2 together and came up with
‘IDIOCRACY’-—
Brain
Work,
Not.
Yeah, not mutually exclusive. Few things are in things like this.
It will change or our society will crumble. It changing is what I fear because it will feed the inflation spiral I can’t afford.
Idiocracy needs to be
Represented ‘Frito Bendejo’
Knarf was Stumped,,,,
Go Figure.
Busting your butt is a needed thing for successful people .
Taking that too far can happen as well. One just needs to take care of their self .
However working hard and going above and beyond is how people get ahead.
Quiet quitting sounds like a lazy, self centered behavior. And that leads to more whining and complaining how unfair things are .
“That nasty person owns a house and I don’t . That’s not fair, tax them and take their money . They are selfish and they should pay my student loans .
Waaahhh, waaahhh”
OOPS!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.