Quiet quitting is a description for people who are unhappy in their job but, for whatever reason, don’t feel able to leave.
What does it mean to be a quiet quitter?
Quiet quitting is a description for people who are unhappy in their job but, for whatever reason, don’t feel able to leave. As a result, they reduce the effort that they are putting into their job, doing the minimum and nothing beyond. Quiet quitting as a term took off in the summer of 2022 after a US TikTokker posted a video that went viral saying “work is not your life”, as reported here on BBC News. This resonated with the post-Covid feelings of millions of employees.
But it’s a significant threat to both short- and long-term organisational performance. And it’s something that all company executives and leaders should be concerned about and take action to address. It eats away at all aspects of the effective operation of the organisation; its ability to deliver strategic objectives and achieve its vision.
Employees who are quiet quitting are a real drain on team performance and can negatively affect workplace culture.
What’s caused quiet quitting?
Quiet quitting has always been with us but the Covid-19 pandemic massively increased the potential for it. It’s caused by the same drivers which gave us the ‘Great Resignation’. So, what caused the Great Resignation? One simple phrase explains both quiet quitting and is the impetus for the Great Resignation – our experiences create our perceptions. These then determine our behaviour at work in response to different situations.
As the Great Resignation, or indeed also the great ‘I’m not even going back’, started all of us had come through two years of being locked in and locked down. We all saw serious illness on a scale that none of us had ever experienced. Some of us also suffered a personal tragedy. It brought home to each of us how precious and short life could be. As a result of this potentially traumatic life experience for all of us, lots of people reprioritised what was important in life. For most, this meant that the importance of work significantly dropped compared to the importance of family, free time, quality of life, and well-being. It was probably the greatest reality check many of us have ever experienced.
It was those changed perceptions that raised the benchmarks by which we measured what we wanted and expected from work, especially from our leaders.
What drives quiet quitting or resigning?
People are no longer prepared to tolerate poor leadership, overwork and antisocial hours, unfair rules, not being treated with respect, having our private lives undervalued, and not being able to grow and develop as a person or see a positive future ahead. So the benchmark against which people measured their leaders and organisations was raised. Leaders who were tolerated before the pandemic were now seen in a new light and seen as unacceptable – so people left. Analytics firm Gallup reports that this is reflected in falls in employee engagement in many countries.
The reasons for which people left organisations are likely to be very similar to the reasons which trigger quiet quitting, so it’s worth looking at the headline reasons for departure as reported by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
These include:
- Uncaring leaders: not feeling valued by the boss or the organisation
- No sense of belonging
- Lack of flexible working
- Lack of visible potential advancement
- Unmanageable workload
- Lack of engagement
- Poor work-life balance
However, how many of us are in a secure enough financial position to leave our jobs without one to go to? Not many. Not everyone can leave when they want, despite a rise in those prepared to do so even without a job to go to.
With a leader who doesn’t meet their standards, people who can’t leave will stay as ‘quiet quitters’ until they can. Just doing enough to get by. In particular Generation Z – that’s those born after 1995 – have a very different view of the priority between work and personal time, and what they expect from their leaders and organisations. They view the reasons listed in the infographic more negatively than other groups and expect a greater focus on well-being in the workplace.
It’s also worth noting that many employers don’t often recognise or admit the key drivers for resignations, they say it’s other things which they cannot control like employees leaving through sickness or being poached by competitors to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the departure.
Why is quiet quitting so dangerous?
Quiet quitting is more dangerous precisely because you’re not resigning. It can have a greater negative impact on organisations than if people just left. If somebody leaves, they are gone and can be replaced by somebody prepared to give maximum effort – often coming in as an enthusiastic new employee. If they stay, their negative impact could linger for months if not years, and attitudes impact their colleagues.
Despite the damage they are potentially causing, identifying quiet quitters and trying to re-engage them can be extremely difficult for a leader. Those who quiet quit could be underperforming by 30% on their potential performance. Not only that but if their behaviour starts to have a negative impact on others in the team – they become disengaged and damaging. It’s reported by Gallup that you need to have four engaged employees to counter the negative impact of every one disengaged quiet quitter.
Daily examples of quiet quitting
It might be useful to give a few practical examples of what the difference is in terms of day-to-day behaviour between those who are engaged – giving their best – and those who are quiet quitting, by definition not engaged or even disengaged. Here we illustrate the significant negative impact which this can have.
How widespread is the problem of quiet quitting?
The figures for the number of people leaving jobs have increased but there is an additional and worrying dynamic. Before the pandemic, most people wouldn’t leave a job unless they had a new one, but now the number who will has significantly increased. Potentially up to 60 to 70% of people are now prepared to leave without a job if they feel they need to, say McKinsey & Company. Global media company Forbes also reports that this is particularly affecting the Gen Z group, where 77% are already thinking of leaving, a precursor to quiet quitting and potentially departure.
This single change in perception vastly increases the ease and speed at which people can leave. No longer does there have to be a long and sustained period of dissatisfaction with your boss or research into potential new jobs. If you don’t care about having another job, your departure decision can be very swiftly implemented and it could be triggered by just one incident which has pushed you too far.
The data on how many people leave organisations versus those who are potentially quiet quitting is dramatic. Standard organisational turnover could be between 10 to 15%, but in annual surveys, the number of people who say they might consider leaving organisations if they could find a better job is around 40%, rising to 54% for Gen Z. So we can potentially make the judgement that for every person who leaves an organisation there may be 3 or 4 staff members considering it. So a significant number of people could be quiet quitting to some degree. Therefore organisations potentially have a quiet quitting iceberg – the danger hidden under the surface and almost impossible to assess.
How do you measure quiet quitting and the wider problem?
While I say that getting evidence of individual quiet quitting is very difficult at a strategic level, an aggregate picture with reasonable accuracy can be obtained using employee engagement data. This data groups employees into three populations:
- The engaged – people who are giving their best.
- The not engaged – people doing enough to get by or sometimes giving their best depending on how they feel.
- The disengaged – people actively avoiding contributing to the organisation.
It’s unlikely that your engaged people will want to leave because, to be classified as engaged, they will have given feedback confirming they are having a positive experience, and their work is consistently good. Your quiet quitters are within the ‘not engaged’ or potentially even the ‘disengaged’ groups depending on how disaffected they are. The ‘disengaged’ are much easier to spot than the ‘not engaged’ because there are often weak elements within their performance. Whereas the ‘not engaged’ can be performing satisfactorily but just not giving their best – withholding their ‘discretionary effort’.
Quiet quitters are embedded in these ‘not engaged’ and ‘disengaged’ groups – and potentially in large numbers. Data from Gallup’s workplace engagement survey 2022 shows levels of employee engagement. This is the percentage of employees giving their best. In most European countries it’s under 25%, with the UK at a dismal 9%. In the USA and Canada, employee engagement levels are a more respectable 33%. The differential between the US and Canada, Europe in general, and the UK are significant – why this is happening is a bigger question for another article.
This means that in the UK, on average, 91% of employees are either ‘not engaged’ or ‘disengaged’ so not giving their best and therefore could be quiet quitters – this is horrifying! But even in the US and Canada, with a 33% engagement rate, it still means a potential quiet quitter population of up to 67%.
