Should Quiet Quitting Really Be ‘Quiet’?
Do just enough to get by and not be fired- for a striving, high-achievement-oriented group of people, doesn’t sound inspiring at all! We are hustlers who go above and beyond, reward doing the ‘more’ along with excelling in the core, multi-tasking, stretching, double hatting, and taking additional projects is what we recognise! But we’ve also had the other side, remember the transferrable bank jobs where people used to forgo promotions to stay at lesser pay ensuring kids' education and family stability?
Quiet quitting- is it just old wine in a new bottle or is there genuinely something different happening? Like many other pandemic-induced trends, this one is also not completely new but accelerated and more in the open for sure.
Will quiet quitting solve the work-life balance, especially since it has emerged as one of the perpetual low-scoring subjects on employee engagement surveys? However, before we declare "quiet quitting" to be the antidote for all work-life balance issues, let's explore the fundamental "why" behind this phenomenon.
Firstly, people are seeing work as only one part of their much larger life and proactively defining how much they want to give to it. It could be due to a life phase or simply a personal choice. This may be a good thing as it creates a transparent environment between the organisation and the employee and enables an open dialogue between both parties. Hence, making this choice should be an active discussion, not a quiet move. However, to enable such an open discussion, companies need to create an inclusive culture based not only on policies but also trust; where employees can walk their chosen path and grow at their own pace without any judgement from the company, not just in terms of policy but also in practice. This is not easy!
As leaders, we need to increasingly view the relationship between employees and the organisation as an equal one. I believe that both millennials and Gen Z have vociferously expressed the point that management should respect their boundaries and understand that they “have a life” after work. They will not blindly subscribe to the traditional age-old values that their seniors believed in, such as worshipping work, working overtime, over-committing, and falling into the timeless organisational loyalty trap. On the contrary, they are bound to question everything about their organisations as well as employers. And this may not be a bad thing at all.
However, I often ponder whether quiet quitting is a ‘privileged outlook’. Is this phenomenon applicable to those who can afford to cut back work for lesser pay or those who have achieved what they set out to and don’t really need to prove anything anymore? But what about that section of under-represented, invisible, and disadvantaged individuals? Does quiet quitting as an option truly exist for them in a non ‘quiet’ way? Given our country's growing population, there will never be a dearth of hustlers or people who will never say no to work.
Another reason for quiet quitting is that employees do not seem to be engaged with their organisation. This could be due to multiple reasons such as the nature of work, relationship with the manager or leadership, belief in the organisational direction, limited career growth and development prospects. If most of your employees fall in this category, you should be worried, reflect on why this is happening and figure out the next steps to curb quiet quitting. In such a case, it may not be an employee’s choice but a result of the negative interaction between the employee and the organisation, which will most likely lead to attrition.
Quiet quitting is a great topic to discuss, write about and host conferences on. However, as leaders, it is important for us to recognize the shift in what employees are looking for today. We need to create workspaces that appreciate and accept people for who they are, what they want, and enable them to work based on how they want to design their lives. As with any element of organisational culture, this will be a journey of change with some resistance and the only way to drive it forward would be through leadership commitment. Quiet quitting (I wish there was a more positive term for it) will bring in a different kind of diversity with employees leading different working styles and hoping not to be judged but appreciated for their choices. This is not old wine in a new bottle, but a genuine shift in employee preferences that is here to stay.
The only caveat is that quitting should not happen in a ‘quiet’ way. Instead, employers should encourage a healthy dialogue with their employees and build a relationship of trust between the employee and the employer. Only then will your people remain more committed and productive than ever.
(The article has been written by Bhavya Misra, Director & Head of HR, Lenovo India specially for BW People publication)
