The Disadvantages of Quiet Quitting For starters, quiet quitting can affect productivity and work culture. Just doing the bare minimum can result in significantly less output and collaboration. When employees reduce their work output, their team will often try to cover them, increasing their workload.
Pay discrepancies are one of the leading causes of quiet quitting. The issue isn't that employees don't want to do the extra work but don't feel appropriately compensated for their efforts. More than money, the root of the problem is a lack of respect.
Quiet quitting is passive-aggressively checking out. Quiet quitters will be the first to be let go when the labor market cools.
The employee avoids any tasks and communications that occur outside of the workplace. In HR terms, such employees are disengaged. The goal of a quiet quitter is to do the least amount of work so that they don't get fired.
The most effective way to address quiet quitting is to have an open and honest conversation with employees. You can take the “quiet” out of “quiet quitting,” by airing the issues out in the open. For the employee to feel comfortable enough to be honest, you should clarify that this talk is not a punishment.
Quiet quitters have decided that working themselves to burnout, or above and beyond what they're paid, isn't what their life is about. They are embracing this new trend and setting boundaries while quietly striking a work/life balance.
Bare Minimum Mondays may be the less drastic alternative to quiet quitting.
Twenty-one percent of workers are 'quiet quitting,' choosing to put in only the bare minimum and just doing what they are paid to do.
However, quiet quitting could be a sign that an employee is not happy in their position or is experiencing burnout. Quiet quitting is a way the employee deals with burnout to help alleviate stress. It may also mean they are ready to change positions or may be currently looking for another job.
The term quiet quitting came about as a rationale for the Great Resignation, or Americans' sustained willingness to quit their jobs in search of better ones during the pandemic. Work did not have to take priority in their lives, and if it did, they could quit.
In short, quiet quitting has been popularized recently with employees that are just at a job for the paycheck and aren't really emotionally or intellectually engaged. It's about doing the bare minimum, and not going “above and beyond”.
Another related buzzword of 2023 is Bare Minimum Monday — or as Insider's Rebecca Knight and Tim Paradis wrote: "the TikTokian progeny of 'quiet quitting. '" While this involves doing just the minimum on Mondays, it's similar given quiet quitting includes not doing more than you are required to.
Quiet quitting—and low morale in general—affects recruitment and retention. It also impacts productivity and efficiency on an organizational level. Rather than villainizing quiet quitting, Human Resource teams can use these signals to come up with thoughtful ways to better connect and align with employee needs.
Quiet quitting is when employees continue to put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs, but don't go the extra mile for their employer. This might mean not speaking up in meetings, not volunteering for tasks, and refusing to work overtime.
It describes workers who aren't leaving their jobs but are quitting the notion of going above and beyond for their companies when they are not experiencing the same effort in return. In short, quiet quitting is the natural response to toxic workplaces and low incentives.
When passionate employees become quiet, according to Tim McClure, it usually sends a signal that the work environment has become very dysfunctional. Suspicion and insecurity clouds the culture and employees retreat into self-protection behavior patterns to protect themselves from the forces within the company.
“Quiet quitters” refers to employees sitting back and doing the bare minimum, never going above and beyond at work and just about meeting the requirements of their role descriptions. While the term itself may feel new, it is in essence a new name for an old problem: disengagement.
How are the pioneers of the Great Resignation doing? One – admittedly very small – survey this year suggested 80% regretted their decision; another last year highlighted a similar percentage (72%) who experienced regret or surprise after quitting for a different job.
There are bad qualities that can be adopted from quiet quitting too, such as lack of motivation, underdevelopment of skills, lack of flexibility and inability to work in a team setting.
Quiet quitting then, is often used to cope with burnout. It has been defined in a couple of different ways — some describe it as not actively going above and beyond at work, while others see it as doing only the bare minimum to remain employed.
Leaving a job before you've been there for an entire year almost always looks bad on your resume. Great resumes also don't show several years spent bouncing from job to job. It might be worthwhile to wait things out and look elsewhere once your resume is better padded. You can get the changes you want.
There is obviously nothing wrong with feeling guilty about leaving your job. In fact, it's a good sign that you value the company you work for and people you work with. Most people don't want to leave their colleagues in the lurch – particularly if they and your company have been good to you.
Resignations Often Lead to Lower Productivity
The employees who remain may share some of that repertoire, but not all of it, so they struggle to keep up with the workload, thereby lowering productivity levels that existed before the employee submitted her resignation.