Quiet Quitting is a phrase that describes doing the bare minimum at work.
Quiet quitting started making headlines in August after Zaid Khan, a 24-year-old engineer, posted a TikTok video. The video said that quiet quitting was “not about ghosting work or deliberately performing poorly enough to be fired” but “leaving the office after eight hours, not answering emails at night, and not going above and beyond required duties.”
“You’re still performing your duties, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life,” Kahn said in the video. “The reality is it’s not, and your worth as a person isn’t defined by your labor.”
The quiet quitting movement has captured a lot of buzz in social media and the news, but Wharton Business School’s management Professor Matthew Bidwell, says he does not believe employers are too worried about workers joining the quiet quitting movement. In fact, it probably isn’t on the top of mind for workplace concerns.
Professor Bidwell sees the quiet quitting movement as a familiar trend in work behavior with a new name. He essentially equated the quiet quitting movement to a prior term that has been around for a while – work-life balance. He said, “the current generation of workers isn’t the first generation to feel conflicted; tension between building a successful career and fulfilling personal life has always existed. Most people simply don’t have enough time or energy to do both.”
Bidwell, who spends much of his time talking with executives and HR professionals, said that employers are still concerned about productivity and getting the best performance out of employees., but most of their worries are over employee burnout and their actual resignations.
In August, nearly 4.3 million workers voluntarily quit their jobs, an historical level in the last two (2) decades of government data.
Bidwell said, “the labor market is “really confusing” right now for employers because the numbers don’t make a lot of sense. Interest rates are rising. GDP is flat, and the tight labor market is just beginning to soften — although not by much. Unemployment rose by two-tenths of a percent in August to 3.7%, which is still historically low.”
“It’s bizarre. We’ve got all these indicators pointing in completely different directions,” Bidwell said.
Employers’ “big questions are: How do we hang on to people? How do we find new people, the right people? And how do we strike this balance between giving people the flexibility to work from home, which they want, while also maintaining some cohesive organizational culture,” Bidwell said. “I think those things, much more than quiet quitting, are what’s on people’s minds.”
SOURCE: Wharton School of Business