Tik Tok has hatched the latest viral trend, signalling yet another sea change in the workplace: with “Quiet Quitting”, people are putting minimal effort into their jobs, to the benefit of their personal lives.

Quiet Quitting: you’ll probably have come across this expression on social media or in the news recently. It refers to a new phenomenon that’s sweeping across the younger working population: they are essentially giving up their jobs without saying so.

Quiet quitting could be a direct consequence of phenomena such as the Great Resignation and the Great Reimagination. After mass resignations, and in many cases a total rethink of working conditions to enable a better work-life balance, the current trend is to only work as little as strictly necessary.

Are people quitting their jobs altogether? Nope.

People are quitting doing any more than they have to.

The concept of “workaholism” is a thing of the past. Now, workers are gradually disengaging from personal initiatives, extra workloads and overtime. Instead, they’re choosing to focus on improving the quality of their free time outside the office.

The data

According to the State of the global workplace 2022 report, compiled by market research firm Gallup, just 14% of employees in Europe are truly engaged in their jobs, and just 33% feel job satisfaction. Gallup also found that in the United States, quiet quitters make up at least half of the workforce, and this figure seems set to rise further.

Millennials & Gen Z: when the most productive generations drop out

With the Great Resignation, we witnessed people resign en masse, in many cases without having another job opportunity lined up. Immediately after that, the Great Reimagination led companies to rethink and redesign working conditions, making topical issues such as flexible working and work-life balance a priority.

However, these two changes did not manage to quell the risk of burnout; nor did they succeed in making workers feel truly satisfied and fulfilled by their working conditions. The knock-on effect is this latest phenomenon of Quiet Quitting.

It’s often not the case that quiet quitters are in a job that doesn’t suit them or leaves them feeling completely dissatisfied with their working life. instead, they seem to be prioritizing the new values that emerged in the post-pandemic era, over their careers.

Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly disengaging from their jobs, focusing instead on their private lives, relationships and passions. This is a symptom of how time is taking on new significance; devotion and being constantly available are losing out to the values of flexibility and personal well-being. In this landscape, companies have clearly failed to build a connection and sufficient motivation in their staff, and have neglected vital aspects such as listening, communication and opportunities to grow. 

So, quiet quitters aren’t handing in their resignations. They’re just silently changing their approach to work.

Is this a problem? It certainly is, especially for companies who have opted to make up most of their workforce from these two generations. There’s a very large group which now, without saying a word, is still showing up for work but only doing what’s strictly required of them. And there don’t seem to be any clear solutions to the problem, for the moment at least.

What is clear, if we decode the quiet quitting trend, is that companies still have a long way to go on issues such as flexible working and work-life balance, to meet the needs of workers and negotiate the new equilibrium between work and personal life. This is crucial if they want to rebuild a connection with their employees, especially those in the younger generations.

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