It's time to stop playing into this terrible "quiet quitting" craze.
"Quiet quitting" has emerged in recent weeks in a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal, Metro, USA Today, and other outlets. While the definition is fuzzy, the idea is that more workers are no longer going above and beyond for their companies, choosing to focus on their work-life balance. Most everything written about the trend has portrayed it as a form of worker rebellion and boss victimization in which "bad" workers have recently chosen not to take their job too seriously.
The term itself is meaningless because workers who are "quiet quitting" are still doing their jobs (and clearly doing them well enough not to get fired). But if you want to know why bosses are so worried about the trend, a part of The Journal's piece — generally a meandering pro-capital screed — gives it away:
"Clayton Farris, 41 years old, said that when he recently heard about the new term circulating on social media he realized he'd already been doing it by refusing to let work worries rule over him the way they used to. 'The most interesting part about it is nothing's changed,' he said in his TikTok video. 'I still work just as hard. I still get just as much accomplished. I just don't stress and internally rip myself to shreds.'"
What Farris is discussing is a phenomenon called "going to work and doing your job." That this sort of behavior would be a problem exposes "quiet quitting" for what it is: propaganda to punish workers for not doing unpaid labor.
Farris and other "quiet quitters" are simply acknowledging one of the broken elements of work society: Workers are given specific hours they must operate within nonspecifically, and they're promised great things if they work hard but are rarely told what working hard means or what the specific output should be. "Quiet quitting" isn't a nefarious rebellion against well-meaning employers — it's workers doing exactly what they were paid to do in the hours they're told to do it.
All stick, no carrot
The dogma of the workplace tells us that hard work gets you paid, but the reality is that hard work at the right time in a way that is visible to the right person is what truly matters. Bosses bank on people working harder for a nonspecific reward. Managers fail to set realistic expectations for what a worker does, which means the worker never truly knows what "enough" is. This works very well for the company, as it's able to start piling nonspecific expectations upon you, rationalizing them as "being a team player" and "proving you want it." It dangles promotions and the possibility of more pay as incentives for working longer hours, taking on responsibilities beyond your job description, and generally eating crow to make your manager look better. But employees have become wise to this, and the "quiet quitting" freakout is managers and bosses crying foul because they're having to actually staff for those needs or pay employees more to do the work that management had expected to get for free.
This is particularly true for people with salaries. Hourly workers know that extra assignments or burdensome work will have to be compensated with overtime, but bosses have used salaries to abuse knowledge workers by blurring the expectations of these workers' actual work product and working hours. By not paying you hourly, the company gets a better deal, selling the illusion of job security while setting up an amorphous structure where it's hard to refuse extra work or log off.
But the pandemic shifted working conditions and employees' expectations of how they should be treated in their jobs. Whereas businesses received loans with generous terms and forgivable balances, raked in record profits that mostly benefited wealthy shareholders, and produced windfalls for their executives, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs and their lives. Unsurprisingly, this led to a shift in how employees viewed their work. A massive study described in The Journal found that how leaders treated their workers and how many they laid off during the pandemic had a direct and meaningful effect on employee engagement.
Why would you go above and beyond? What reward is there for doing so? Capitalism has all but done away with the concept of mentorship and career development for young people, and companies rarely if ever show true appreciation for labor. Companies whining about "quiet quitting" are upset that workers are realizing they should put as much effort into their work as they're paid for and responsible for rather than doing more work for no reward.
Empty desks are freaking bosses out
The meaningless panic over "quiet quitting" is also more evidence that the office was the Vatican of work: a place where dogma was spread to convince people that doing more work without any compensation was a moral good. The nonspecific requirements of your time at the office were used to extract more labor from you. It worked, because within every office was a miniature society — what most people call "office culture" — that employed professional tattletales (managers) to make sure you were doing work. The societal structure of the office made applying pressure to go above and beyond easier, because being seen as someone who turned down work — or, euphemistically, "opportunity" — would make you seem like an outlier. Without that pressure, workers are doing the work they're told to do within the time frame that it has to be done and not rushing to take on other people's responsibilities or work longer hours that they won't be paid for.
Bosses knew — or thought they knew — that they were getting their money's worth because you were working (at least) eight continuous hours. But with remote work, companies have to actually evaluate outputs and the things we create instead of relying on the aesthetics of work. This creates a problem because companies are terrible at accurately measuring outputs — so they're left trying to vaguely gauge what people are doing or turning to draconian surveillance of employees. This isn't a failure of remote work but rather a failure of managers and bosses to understand how to best help their employees succeed.
Managers, let me have a word
"Quiet quitting" is a sleazy way of turning the worker into a thief. If you're an executive worried about quite quitting, you're a bad boss — you do not understand what your employees are doing, or you're asking them to do more without giving them a reason to do it. If you're a manager worried about "quiet quitting," please quit and never seek employment that involves you determining the professional future of another person.
But if you're a boss or manager who wants to do right by your employees and incentivize people to grow into larger roles or new responsibilities, there are two things you can do:
- Be very specific about career paths and outputs. If you want someone to work harder and "do more," you must make a crystal-clear career trajectory that includes obvious metrics and milestones. If you want someone to go above and beyond what they're doing, you need to tell them what "above and beyond" looks like in a tangible way. Be clear that once they hit a predetermined metric within a certain time frame, they'll receive a promotion or advance along the trajectory. If you can't do this, you cannot cry about anyone not working hard. You are failing to properly incentivize them.
- Give them more money. If I were to walk up to a vending machine and put in a dollar for one Diet Coke but expect two Diet Cokes, I would seem ridiculous. Similarly, if you want your workers to work harder or take on additional responsibilities, incentivize them to do so by paying them more for doing it. You're receiving more value from that person, so it's only right to share that increased value with them. Give them more money, and give it to them immediately.
The reason that all of this is so painfully dissonant for management is that they have lost control of the narrative. For years, workplace dogma framed as "office culture" allowed them to extract more labor through direct and indirect forms of abuse, and without it, workers are realizing there is no moral good in working hard. Work is an exchange of money for labor, and if you want more labor from your workers, you should be prepared to pay for it instead of making up meaningless faux pathologies to frame hardworking people as slackers.