Quiet Quitting

Quiet Quitting is a rising trend for a common form of job abandonment when an employee becomes absent or simply walks away without notice.  The term describes employees who either become increasingly mentally or physically absent from the workplace or simply walk away from a job without notice.  Quiet Quitting is often a subtle job abandonment that occurs when people have grown tired of their work or employer but don’t want to make a fuss. 

Quiet Quitting is a critical issue, particularly with the shift towards telecommuting and flex-time.  Managers, supervisors, and human resources professionals should prepare themselves to recognize this behavior as well as steps they can take to retain staff.  People’s reasons for quitting their jobs vary, but experts say it takes only one negative experience – whether as a manager or employee – to push someone over the edge.  Reasons why people quit their jobs are work and workplace dissatisfaction, lack of inspiration, or they are simply too overwhelmed to continue.  

In the early stages of a professional career, everything boils down to access.  You need a job to get experience for your résumé, and you’re set when you get that job.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t enjoy or dislike it, as long as the pay is decent, and you can keep climbing that corporate ladder.  All you need to do is last long enough in the workplace until something better comes along.   By the time we’re in our late twenties, most of us have had a job we quickly grew to hate.  Perhaps a boss was rude or incompetent, or your colleagues were not supportive—or even nasty.  These frustrations are natural and understandable.  Work can be stressful, often frustrating, and hard to bear. 

There are substantiated reasons why people aren’t entirely forthright when Quiet Quitting their job.  For some, those reasons become unendurable, and they abandon their job without notice.  Employees become less present at the office, drifting in and out of meetings, showing up late or not at all, or not having their work done on time or completed as expected.  Other team members may look for specific reasons to explain this behavior.  Or worse, employees go to work but don’t perform well because they are distracted by depression or anxiety.  That’s when things can get complicated (and expensive) for the company (e.g., poor customer service, missed sales opportunities, production slowdown).

As more people work remotely, they may be less accountable for their actions and absences.  These absences can lead to problems with team cohesion and achieving goals.  Another way to describe quiet quitting is through the phenomenon of presenteeism, where employees show up regularly but are either not fully engaged in their work or are simply working to stay out of trouble so they can collect a paycheck. 

If managers feel their employees are disengaged, they should develop strategies to recapture and motivate these potentially ‘quiet quitting’ employees who may disappear at the most inconvenient moment.  Examining why an employee might choose to walk out of the door is essential.  Five of the strategies noted by organizational leaders to improve work conditions are:

1. Provide comfortable office equipment, temperature control workspaces, natural lighting (windows vs. overhead), add plants, and open the space for more team collaboration.  Get to know the team as individuals; ask what they like to work on or what frustrates them (and why?).  Mentor subordinates on potential growth and career expectations.
2. Build a positive workplace culture by encouraging team activities, interaction, and facilitating non-work-related bonding experiences.  Encourage friendly (and fair) team competition to improve focus, motivation, and productivity.
3. Acknowledge efforts with positive work advice, face-to-face and monthly or quarterly meetings to share feedback and show ‘public’ (internal) appreciation for completed projects or hard-to-achieve goals reached.
4. Build mutual trust by ‘trusting them’ to get the work done. Strive to gain mutual trust by avoiding micro-managing their methodology and protocol.  Get feedback from the team members to identify potential project or workplace issues and ask for innovative solutions to their concerns.
5. Ensure timely and open communication – including ‘open-door’ policies, immediate conflict resolutions, and discussing potential challenges and solutions to issues with regular communication.  Increase transparency by letting the team know why they perform specific tasks or assign undesirable projects and answer their concerns.

Dawn Boyer, Ph.D., owner of D. Boyer Consulting – provides resume writing, editing, publishing, and print-on-demand consulting.  Reach her at: Dawn.Boyer@me.com or visit her website at www.dboyerconsulting.com.