Quiet Quitting – The Bigger Issue

Quiet Quitting – The act of doing the minimum possible work for your employer and leaving with minimal fuss, quietly.

This, however is, a polarizing issue. And this post is going to be a balanced exploration with the goal to establish why it’s a bigger issue – and it might not be the outcome you’re expecting.

Support of Quiet Quitting

One argument is in support of quiet quitting. If employers do not look after employees what do they expect? The current jobs market is brilliant. People have many options for jobs if they want to leave the one they are in. Therefore, if an employer does not treat that employee well, they should not be surprised if they go elsewhere.

The support for Quiet Quitting is therefore support for people being treated well.

Opposition to Quiet Quitting

The opposite argument approaches it from another angle. It is one where quiet quitting is not typically about employees being treated badly. Instead it is about people trying to justify underperformance, laziness and taking advantage of companies being under pressure to bend over backwards for entitled employees. It is one where a snowflake generation cannot handle even minor levels of performance pressure despite that they are being paid a fair wage.

I told you it would be a balanced exploration didn’t I?

How did we get here?

The combination of a strong and healthy employment market and skills shortages have led to a candidate driven market. Candidates have the balance of power tipped in their favour.

Add to that Millennial and Gen X workers joining the industry and taking up a sizeable portion of the market. The result is that you have people with a different outlook to work than their parents’ generation in a position of supposed power over employers.

Finally add in a dramatic increase in mental health issues in younger generations, a cost of living crisis and currently various worries including a recession and a possible nuclear war and what do you expect.

What is the bigger issue?

The bigger issue is that the UK is decreasing in productivity and declining in it’s economy. We are beginning to fall behind. Whether the root cause of Quiet Quitting as poor management or snowflake employees it’s still a contributing factor to the wider problem.

For a company to get a proper return on investment you cannot have people doing minimal work and jumping job every year. Regardless of the reasons why, that outcome is detrimental for the greater good.

Conclusion

Whether it be employers get better at putting people actually first, as opposed to just saying so in their marketing campaigns. Or some employees to stop making excuses for underperformance and actually commit to a company that their letting down.

Either way – there is blame on both sides and we need to take pride in our work because we value it. And these day’s people seem to talk about life away from work rather than work itself. That’s not a bad thing, but if you’ve got a job that you do for most of your waking life, why not do something you have pride in.