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.”
You said it and I took longer to say it in my contribution to this thread. If interested, read my post 112.
What a thread this is. Worth reading the comments if only to see how not alone you are.
It may not be this way in every company but I can tell you that the one I last worked for includes things akin to gang initiation to enter the top club. I was asked to do but refused and so was cashiered when it was next convenient. I have never done anything I considered immoral, unethical, illegal or against my principles and never will. That is no cop out to not rising in the ranks in some places, I once thought it was, just an excuse for failure. I can assure you not, that is not true, it is no cop out. It has taken me years to come to terms with all this but I have seen it many times and still do.
History may not repeat completely, but it rhymes. My kids, now in their 40s are experiencing the very same things I did. My Dad once told me that hard work and smarts will only carry you so far. They will get your foot in the door to the corner offices or board room but after that it takes something else. Maybe not everywhere but everywhere I have seen it takes something else.
If they want people to ‘go the extra mile’ then they need to be coming up with raises, bonuses, and promotions.
All ‘going the extra mile’ does, at a lot of places, is mark you out as a fool.
That’s more and more rare, most big companies are basically “up or out”, and once you’re over 40, they can just bring somebody in to do your job at half the salary.
As an employee, I always had an idea of what I wanted out of the job. Sometimes it was just a steady paycheck so I could pursue other interests. Other times, I wanted to acquire certain skills, experience or knowledge, which sometimes required that I find a way to advance to a position in which those skills would be put to use, and experience accumulated. The trick was always having clarity of what you are after, and positioning oneself to attain whatever goal that might have been.
As an employer, it's a different problem. In our line of work there's certainly a need for young professionals to develop the experience and what we call "deep competence" . Everyone says that's what they want, but often what they mean is that they want the pay, but not necessarily the stress and responsibility that goes along with that.
The other analogy that has clarified these discussions over the years was coined so long ago that I forget the author's name. In essence, the idea is that if you're one of those career track types, at the start of your career, you're going to be paid more than you're worth, because, basically, all you have is academic understanding, no experience, and you're basically not really worth anything. The company's paying for the potential at this stage. Then, for a few years, you'll be paid less than you're worth, sometimes significantly less. This comes when you've finally developed some competence, but you don't actually have the wherewithal or reputation to take your skills elsewhere, or hang out your own shingle. Finally, comes the time when you've clawed your way sufficiently high in the organization that you're paid more than you're worth again, but this time significantly more.
The Gen Z cohort currently entering the labor market has one significant Achilles heel that none of them understand. They've never seen a down market. The 2022 college graduate was 7 years old during the 2007 financial collapse, and have just spent the past two years pretending to study from home. They would like to continue that, and pretend to work from home, as Elon Musk said, and they might be able to get some sort of employment for a while that allows that. Unfortunately, there is always a cycle, always a down to counter the up, and that's coming. Gravity always reasserts itself, and it looks like that's coming sooner rather than later.
Not everyone is like that. Some of us are more efficient and more productive when working from home rather than working in an office.
I learned decades ago that the work hard and you will get ahead talk was a bunch of crap...
Those in management will do whatever and burn whoever they have to to keep their own jobs.
The harder you work, the more extra effort you put in, is rewarded with additional jobs and duties, while you watch others coast, go home, and get the same compensation you do.
Everything I learned about the workplace was taught to me by Basketball Belly Don.
One of his favorite sayings was:
Never put off til tomorrow, what you can put off til the day AFTER tomorrow just as well
Not everyone is like that. Some of us are more efficient and more productive when working from home rather than working in an office.
I think that is highly dependent on both the industry and type of work within the industry that an individual performs. I think that some of the big software companies are finding that to be true of some jobs, but even they are trying to get people back to the office for a variety of reasons.
In the case of my company, I've heard that from multiple people. The argument often sounds something like this "I can spend the two hours a day I would be commuting on my project, and it's so much more efficient". To which I've been forced to reply "Yeah, it takes you at least as long to produce the first draft, and then a senior staff member has to spend extra time marking up your work to correct it (rather than just sitting down and telling you what to do), and that cycle happens multiple times. I actually have the numbers: it takes, roughly 20-30% more man-hours (including supervisor time, staff time, correction etc.) to get a product that is almost as good as what we had before."
I've heard the same thing from other industries in the professional service sector, all have the same problem. Extends to law, accounting, A+E, construction managment (even office based).
Plus we find that we can't properly train and advance junior professionals. Mentoring over Zoom doesn't appear to work nearly as well as in-person. Relationships critical for a career wither.
Some jobs, sure, maybe it works. But it's not a one-size fits all solution, and gen Z is the least able to make the claim that they are "more productive" from home.
Our country was founded by men who were told to work harder to pay more taxes for Britain and also explicitly told they'd never have representation for it.
Many of these korporations have aligned with government to subjugate the citizenry. Just look at korporate mandates to take the Jim Jones Jab.
I'm a sysadmin. WFH works better.
I just get perturbed when people lump everyone into the same bucket of laziness who need to be in an office so the useless managers can justify their jobs.
How's that for an ironic statement?
I don’t know. I worked hard and I did get ahead, and I never cared too much about whether the coasters got the same as I did. Everybody knows who’s worth a damn and who’s not, whether or not they’ll admit it.
Oh, don’t get me wrong...
I started working hard, and did get slightly ahead, but I also watched the “losers” as they are called on this thread, come out farther ahead than I...
Different scenarios I guess
Different Scenarios,,,
I busted Azz but didn’t kiss any.
Same as You, possibly.
.
Cheers
I busted ass until my early ‘50’s...
Then I saw and had experienced the frivolity of it all...
Vanity,,
All is Vanity.
.
Agreed,
I waited till Full retirement last year and now it’s finding my way to
The Streets of Gold !
Excellent point. Companies have zero loyalty. They see long term employees as expensive. The young now know they are expendable, so why bother with returning any loyalty. Heck, why work hard. Most employees already do the least necessary to keep their job, but this goes well past even that. F’em, is the attitude.
Seruzawa, when I go to a mechanic to get a tire fixed, I expect them to fix the tire. I don't expect them to rotate and balance all the tires for free. They might recommend to me that I need a rotation and I'll consider it and expect to pay more.
I don't expect the mechanic to go 'above and beyond'.
Same thing with a dentist or doctor. (though I'd rather have a mechanic balance my tires - joke!). I go to them, they diagnose my issue and offer solutions, and I decide what I will pay them to do, and I will pay accordingly.
If I need a lawyer or accountant, mechanic, or plumber, I know that I'll have to pay for their experience. If I need a really good lawyer, I know I'll need to pay through the nose.
Employers must also recognize these facts. If they want experienced go-getters, they need to pay for and reward those services. If they want a 'woke' workforce that rewards diversity to extremes of incompetence, then they can have that at the cost of losing their core, solid, knowledgeable employees.
"You always do the best job you can. F*** a bunch of slackers."
I agree to a point. I think that's your military mentality breaking through. If Chief or Sarge told you to fill 50 sandbags for your position, but you needed 80, you'd go ahead and fill the other thirty, right?
In the corporate world, when the boss says your quota is 50 bags, but we really need 80 and I need you to skip lunch and work late...? Different entirely.
Add to that your required diversity training that you have to do online (unpaid) over your weekend because you're too busy at work...
Add a transgender dude with boobs who thinks he's a woman and is a "lawsuit lieutenant colonel" who lives to file IG complaints and more lawsuits.
I quit. Not quietly, but having worked 80-100 hour weeks for a period of years with no benefit, I pared it back to 50-60 hours a week. That was my "quiet quitting". In the end, about a month ago, I quit. Tired of wokeness in DOD, tired of no upward mobility because Boomers clogging up the 'corporate ladder' until they die at their desks (happened twice to me).
I'll live off savings for another 13 years or so until I can tap my IRAs. I'm early Gen-X and I 'retired' really early.
Thank you for your service in VN, brother!
Kit
PS: my great curiosity is which bathroom this sick colonel with boobs uses for piss testing? Awkward either way for the examiner!
PPS: more for you on FReepmail
Sounds all too familiar.
Quiet quitting is nothing new. We used to have a term for it when I entered the workforce in the 1970s - “skating.”
```````````````````````````````````````````
I first heard the term “sand bagging”, in the service in 1963.
This is the same HR Management mumbojumbo they have said for decades! HR and Managers still do not 'get it.' Quiet quitting is the same thing happening in China with the "lay flat."
Younger generations have no hope for a better life. And as long as that hope is not re-ignited by the culture and society the country will not continue to proper. I believe the proper term here is 'failure to thrive.' This problem goes much deeper than the workplace.
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.