It appears to be the new workplace trend. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly talking about quiet quitting.
Quiet quitting is the idea that workers shouldn’t worry about going above and beyond, shouldn’t work overtime or additional hours, or push to get something done if that means doing more than what’s in the job description or outside of regular work hours, and instead workers should do what it takes to meet expectations — and that’s it.
What does quiet quitting look like? It could mean turning off notifications and putting your phone on 'do not disturb' after 5pm, ignoring calls or emails and leaving the office as soon as your rostered day is done.
In 2022 there has been an explosion of interest in the term, with articles and think-pieces going through the pros and cons of employees deciding to just not do more than what is needed to get the job done.
It seems from internet sleuthing that the trend can be traced back to articles first published in March this year about “coasting culture”, discussing the idea that rather than joining the great resignation where workers chuck their demanding jobs, you can instead choose to just do enough to get by and keep getting paid.
While coasting can easily be dismissed as employee laziness,” a BBC story said, “it often arises out of deeper underlying issues at a company: from a missed promotion, to feeling their contribution isn’t being met with adequate reward.”
And there is data to show that coasting resonates with employees - a CNBC survey found 39% of those surveyed described themselves as coasting. A Gallup survey published in January reported that US employees' engagement dropped for the first time in a decade, and about half of workers said they were neither engaged, nor disengaged at work.
But some aren’t calling it quiet quitting at all.
“Act your wage” is often being used as a counterpoint slogan to quiet quitting, particularly in lower waged sectors.
One meme swapped out quiet quitting for “inflation adjusted effort”, giving a nod to the spiralling cost of living and wages not keeping pace.
And for many unionists, there is absolutely nothing new about it except the terminology.
Work to rule looks a lot like quiet quitting. Work to rule means working exactly to the rule book; you do the minimum outlined in your contract, and that’s it. It’s considered a step along the path which could lead to more aggressive worker action including strikes.
Coasting, or quiet quitting, can be a reaction to stress and workplace burnout and this seems to be gaining traction as the backdrop for these worker movements.
A recently released survey by the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) and insurer NIB shows why these ideas are catching on.
This survey of 1200 New Zealand workers found 85% of employees suffered tiredness, 63% felt anxious and 69% had difficulty concentrating.
One-in-four employees intended to change jobs in the next 12 months and of those thinking about a career change, 78% said they were looking for flexible working, 74% for career development, 74% for regular performance feedback, and 69% for wellbeing initiatives.
EMA chief executive Brett O’Riley said the survey found the number one cause of workplace stress is understaffing, which often leads to poor work-life balance and places pressure on employees to work longer hours.
He said employees intending to change jobs in the next 12 months should sound a clear warning bell that businesses need to pay more attention to their employees’ wellbeing.
The workplace health and safety regulator, Worksafe, found in its New Zealand Psychosocial Survey that the speed and intensity of work, the need to conceal feelings from other people at work, and workload were the most common sources of psychosocial risk for workers.
It found demands at work are the most common psychosocial risk across the New Zealand workforce.
And a Microsoft report, the New Future of Work Report 2022, found work is changing faster than it has in a generation, thanks to the pandemic.
This report found people are recognising wellbeing as an important component of workplace experiences post-pandemic, and workers are also increasingly recognising the relationship between their workplace experiences and their wellbeing.
A study of 31,000 people from 31 countries published by Microsoft in 2022 found 53% of those surveyed said they are more likely to prioritise their health and wellbeing over work than before the pandemic.
People report a greater need for prioritising health, wellbeing, and family over work compared to pre-pandemic times and they wish to better integrate those needs through how and where they work.
And in Microsoft's Work Trend Index study, 47% of people said they are more likely to put family and personal life over work than they were before the pandemic.
It also found burnout has been on the rise during the pandemic, and workplace was the top stressor for American adults, costing the US economy an estimated $300 billion annually.
I think the term quiet quitting, and coasting, are an extension of the idea popularised by Chinese workers in 2021 called tang ping, or “lying flat” culture.
It is a rejection of hustle culture. A rejection of the idea that work should be the most important thing in our lives, a rejection of spending most of the days of our lives working as hard as we can. It is about embracing life outside of work.
It’s also about realising work will go on, with or without you.
Here’s a tweet from a stressed worker. “Every job where I haven’t quit has exploited me … Every single job I’ve had started to replace me within 48 hours of my quitting. You are a resource. A cog. A widget that makes more widgets.”
Mark Bolino, director of management and international business at the University of Oklahoma, explained it like this.
“The pandemic has forced people to think about life, work and family differently. Much of the workforce has also reassessed how their careers fit into their lives.”
And if your career isn’t fitting into your life as well as you think it should, quiet quitting starts to look appealing.
Of course, the Chinese workers who brought tang ping to the fore now have a new catchphrase I expect will be spun into an English interpretation soon enough.
Now, it is not about lying flat. It’s about giving up, and both facing and accepting that you won’t meet the expectations of your parents, let alone those of Chinese President Xi who recently told graduates to “prevent the situation in which one is unfit for a higher position but unwilling to take a lower one”.
Or, take a job, any job. Please.
With young Chinese facing horrific employment prospects they have adopted the phrase “bai lan” or “let it rot”.
Perhaps lying flat wasn’t so bad after all.
124 Comments
NZ businesses wouldn't have to take this kind of crap if our borders were open to foreigners. [sarc]
Those migrants usually go out of pocket by tens of thousands moving here as a foreign worker or student. You would sell your soul to impress your employer because your future here i.e., PR application is tied to your employer's discretion.
This is more so in case of low-paid workers, which we get plenty of, for whom returning home or going elsewhere is not really an option.
Absolutely. The foreign worker will never complain if moving from a country without welfare benefits - my own immigrant family contains members who would on balance prefer to be in their country of origin but one is here for medical reasons and free education for her Kiwi child and another simply for the pay. Their children only know NZ the land of their birth. They were lucky that they could get residency and then citizenship via me. I feel pity for the low paid immigrants without permanent residency - it is a recipe for exploitation. See Prof Stringers report on worker exploitation in NZ from 2016 - nothing significant has changed.
When I was a manager (now a few years ago) such behaviour would have raised a flag for individual performance management. We also used to have "forced ranking" which meant the bottom 10% of annual performance appraisals were either improved or exited "to encourage the others". And you had to have a distribution that forced it.
The joy of working in multinational companies: most NZdrs still don't know how lucky they are.
Doing your job would have raised red flags?
So what you are saying is that you should work extra hours for free and be happy with your lot.
I've worked for multinationals and they pay better than the local companies by a long shot so could expect a bit more effort.
I read somewhere that Microsoft had a performance management system that biffed the bottom 10%. Apparently it made everyone very risk averse and killed innovation. Why push to develop something hard and risky and worth doing if all you have to do to encourage your semi-technical manager to keep you in the top 90% is add fuzzy borders to a window?
Because there is no carrot to this system if you haven't already made it. It is all one constant "Fuck you" in different forms.
Follow the advice on what you should do to be successful in life, which from early childhood is framed as university graduation? Fuck you, try finding a job. Compete with all the other law grads, useless arts degree holders etc.
Get into the real work and start making your way? Fuck you, try mounting that 150k deposit for a house.
Want to start a business? Fuck you, no loans unless you have a mortgage to leverage to found the business.
Want a family? Fuck you, you and your other half will wage slave full time to afford a mortgage.
Want to retire? Fuck you, there will be nothing left once the boomers are gone.
Want urgent medical treatment? Fuck you, wait in ED for 12 hours or pay thousands.
There is just the stick of poverty and homelessness to keep people going. This system just isn't working for anyone, it makes us all mentally ill, sick and disdainful of our existence.
The theme everyone should be focusing on now is that with such low unemployment, there has never been a better time to find a better role.
And not more gratifying way to give your current gig the middle finger, than turning down their offers for more money (after you hand in your notice) because you have a better job lined up.
Anyone hiring at the moment knows how hard it is right now. Lots of people are trading up for career experience.
Wont last.. be quick!
Yes, it is like that, isn't it? I have not felt this level of angst and thirst for something, anything, to change since the 60s. Of course, the dreams of the 60s never even survived the 70s.
And what do the top dogs have in store for us? CBDCs, more monetary policy fiddling, "stabilising the economy" (ie. keeping things as much the same as they can manage).
Wait till companies start pushing a bit harder to get the troops to come back into the office more often. This is going to be quite a tussle as the power of we Baby Boomers sputters out.
There is no vision of the future in the contemporary overton window, only more tinkering with what exists now. The only visions of the future which exist today are outside political acceptability. As conditions destabilise, we will find ourselves turning to caesarism or being taken over by dedicated extremists.
I agree wholeheartedly and there is a shift happening as I see it. For reference I got burnt out up to march this year and have quiet quit up until the last month or so, it takes time to recover and pull yourself back together.
Wellington is slowly draining as first home buyers leave for more affordable areas and can either work remotely for good coin and have a lower cost of living, large businesses having high staff turnover not only due to culture, but even those with good culture are losing staff to better money elsewhere, youth leaving for overseas where the money can be insane depending what area you are in (reference, I have a friend offered £149k starting rate as a lawyer in London).
All of this coupled with inflation, boomers slowly leaving the workforce, the increase in awareness around mental health and work/life balance, and the mass reflection forced on us by lockdowns have made everyone assess what they really want in life as opposed to working in jobs they may not suit or be happy in anymore.
Plenty of positivity out there amongst though, best time ever to look for a new job, spend more time doing what you're passionate about, meet others who have similar passions, make life changes and smile.
It's definitely noticeable. The streets are quieter, most people under 40 I worked with before covid have now left. The only ones left have families. Many work remote for offshore companies and have moved out of the city. Many traveling or starting fresh in Aus. Can't speak for the whole nation but Wellington in particular is leaking (pun intended).
Recent surveys show that people no longer believe that working hard will lead to a better life. Why would they. It just means you have worked harder to make the rich richer. The whole system is a joke. The efficiencies of technology have not been passed down to the worker, instead they have made the rich richer while the rest of are forced to climb all over each other to even get a sniff of financial freedom or stress free life.
Quiet quitting is the idea that workers shouldn’t worry about going above and beyond, shouldn’t work overtime or additional hours, or push to get something done if that means doing more than what’s in the job description or outside of regular work hours, and instead workers should do what it takes to meet expectations — and that’s it.
So...doing the job you are paid the do? Typically when I see people working long hours is because they are inefficient or waste time.
You also have employers who bully their staff and load them up with unreasonable workload and then have the cheek to tell you that you stink of smoke, or your 12min break was too long, and when you get pissed off and say "oh god" you get hauled into a room and told you can say the word "God" in the workplace because it might offend those who don't believe in god. Well FUCK YOU, what about my beliefs? Beware anyone considering working at a certain building in Stout st, as they have a culture of bullying. Preserve your own mental wellness and stay the fuck away from that bullying employer
Quality guy, may I suggest you get a large loan from a bank, take a huge risk to start your own business, work 80-100 hours a week for the first few years, be in the 20% who make it past the first 5 years, then employ staff as you grow, make sure you know employment law well, and treat your employees very well no matter what they do.
This way you will never be treated badly by a boss ever again. Good luck !
Good timing for this article for anyone aware of the tragedy at EY in Sydney.
Inside story of how a 'brilliant' accountant moved Down Under for a dream job with EY before falling to her death less than a year later in a tragedy that has shocked corporate Australia
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11179843/Ernst-Young-EY-accoun…
Exactly. People throw around the word "socialism" so much these days that it seems to have lost all meaning, but a key tenet of socialism is worker-owned means of production.
Give workers an active stake in the companies they work for (and consequently own), and watch productivity follow job satisfaction through the roof.
I hardly think entrepreneurs whom have fronted tens-of-thousands, if not millions of dollars of their own capital and time should be giving slices of their businesses to employees.
Some Joe Blow wondering in off the street.. "hey dude, nice business.. give me a job and a slice of your capital/business". Given a down year is Joe Blow going to cover the business losses?
If entrepreneurs want to start a business they have to save up, invest capital and take the risk. If workers want to own the business employing them, they need to save up and buy shares, or buy it outright.
Many companies offer stock options and nothing is stopping employees from requesting such in their contracts. There's also nothing stopping employers telling Joe Blow to GO POUND SAND, as it should be.
The socialist, brain-rot, claptrap going around this country at the moment is OUTRAGEOUS!
Also, there is NOTHING stopping ALL the socialists in New Zealand structuring their businesses after the Marxist tradition you call for.
You're doing a great job of illustrating my original point. Nothing happening in this country at the moment is in the least bit socialist. Quite the opposite.
If it was, though, Joe Blow would be getting nothing for free, don't you worry. He'd be buying in to the company as a stakeholder, or getting shares of it in return for his labour. What there would be much less of, however, is these Max-Key-type "entrepreneurs" wandering in with daddy's money and expecting to double it every year by sitting round doing nothing.
At the same time if entrepreneurs want happy productive workers they need to give their employees something real to work for. Otherwise they're left relying on employees to have that same dream and ambition of working hard and actually getting somewhere, which is being lost right now, hence all these news articles about quiet quitters etc.
"Quiet quitting"… I get the feeling that those who "quiet quit" don't just do so with their jobs, but also with their own life, they give up. I would hope that someone's job, no matter how basic, is more than just work, that there is some pride in doing well, and recognition form the employer of a job well done. We spend too much time in our life at work, not enjoy it, do something you like, at least most of the time, then it won't feel like "work", also you'll be good at it and people will notice. Most importantly you'll be happy. Don't give up, don't quit on yourself !
You can also get those things from just doing your job, on a 9 to 5 basis.
I've know slackers who've just done the 9 to 5 thing, but I've also know some great workers who just do the minimum.
Personally, I've always worked hard, done way more than the minimum and strived to achieve more, but I've also know plenty of people who have just done the minimum, but done it well, and good on them.
When dealing with businesses, mainly larger ones, and government authorities, I increasingly get the impression I am being somewhat "looked after" by a "quiet quitter". Whether or not I have an understanding of their reasons, I will certainly not be tempted to do business on that basis. The more people that feel like that, the less those quiet quitter jobs will survive I am afraid. Opportunities for the more responsive businesses and work force.
Whether there is a link between quiet quitting and the dropping productivity - I can only speculate. But if there is a link, quiet quitting becomes a further factor in our inflation figures, which are hurting all of us.
When I first started working for my current employer, we were a US corporate that merged with another US Corp. Saw the head count reductions, people made redundant and asked to reapply for less jobs. Were sold to a private equity firm, split up and found our home with a kiwi business.
Learned the importance of putting my hand up to assist the team when quiet, rather than doing the "bare minimum" as per the job description. When SHTF and the reductions happen, being expected to do the job of 2-3 people is better than sitting at home on the couch.
It's not just employees that are "quiet quitting". CEOs are masters of this. This is often how they got to where they are. Relying on employees working their guts out for a pittance while they took every advantage they could along their career path.
Some employees are just waking up to the fact that their employers "quiet quit" on them ages ago, right from the very beginning.
The arguments here are quite a good bellweather for where general economic sentiment is in the here and now, with a wide spectrum of views and opinions from a variety of backround.
If you're in a retail or large-scale merch environment, it's quite useful to get a handle on where things are sitting without waiting months for a business confidence survey or inflation figures to tell us what has already happened. That's not useful information to me then. I keep this in mind when I'm modelling things like cashflow.
Nobody yet mentioning diminishing returns.
In the First World, 'workers' have been getting relatively - and really - poorer since the 1970's. This was disguised with debt, bread and circuses.
Now, the cross-over point is well behind us; it's worth more to grow food and do your own maintenance at home, than to work for a pittance, borrow the difference and pay someone. As a couple, we live on one 4-day salary; one is permanently at home building, planting, maintaining, producing. It's simply worth more to us, that the second person earning a wage.
Values are changing - and that will only accelerate. Good article.
The "system" constantly try to pull you back into the termite super colony though. Increasing your fixed costs exponentially, while at the same time inflating away the value of any asset you might have and increasing rules that have a cost attached, with even basic levels of needed societal interaction. At no point can you say, "I've got enough to kick back and relax", unless you are 90+ of course. The system doesn't like that. At 90 you're being cleaned out of those now valueless savings acquired from all those years of working overtime for the company anyhow.
This in "management speak" used to be called Disengagement- the action or process of withdrawing from involvement in an activity, situation, or group.
Employees did not put in extra effort as they were not engaged with the organisation, its values or did not like their managers and how they were managed/ led.
The emphasis was on developing managers and leaders who could engage their employees. This meant having strong values that people could relate to, a sense of ownership to the company etc.
I'm not sure if that all got too hard - but now we have turned this 180 degrees and called it quiet quitting with the emphasis not on employers engaging employees but employees been the problem.
Good comment. Some companies are in a permanent state of "emergency measures", not replacing staff, cutting R&D, trying to make employees work harder and more efficiently, micro-managing, implementing new systems to track workers and eliminate individuality. Nirvana is just around the corner...Now some workers are getting tired of it they accuse them of "quiet quitting".
I have never understood why the fat cats cut staff as soon as their bonus is looking marginal.
I did the absolute bare minimum with a large corporate for 18 months while I got my business running. Write good reports, corporate speak at meetings, don't make suggestions above your station, keep your staff happy - pro tip - bbqs for Friday lunch every fortnight,, good bbq, no precooked snags or marinated steaks. Didn't retain vege staff for some reason.
Excellent point. It once was that good leaders had this role.
Many people posting on line about quiet quitting seem to have done so in response to poor management. It's not a problem in the company I work in.
There's also an aspect of poor managerial organisation overloading people with admin as well as work, to the point they can get little done. This is demoralising and causing burnout. Interesting discussions going on in the area of deep work/slow productivity regarding this issue.
I did some analysis of why a company was experiencing a trend of increasing staff turnover, though it wasn't yet over the industry average. I sat down with a couple of trusted long term employees and we went thru the last 50 employees to leave. Two thirds of them had been openly critical of their manager(s) leading up to their resignation. So it comes down to the boss.
However I don't think most people have any idea of how stressed and unhappy your average CEO of a large company is. In my experience over half would have sought help at some point.
Yes, it's another polarisation phenomenon in a world full of them.
My view of where we are headed is the bulk of the population pretty much disengaging (even from family life) and medicating themselves with games, drugs, porn, entertainment, sex bots etc, and the rest becoming super motivated robotic engineers or whatever.
Tim Dillon on what life will be like for most in America. Dare say it but we will follow.
What a depressing article.
Working out what makes me happy and being the best version of myself is how I see life. Understanding my own values and then engaging in activities (including paid work) that helps me enjoy those values makes me content.
If that isn't possible for me while I am employed then work is a means to an end and becomes paid incarceration. I totally understand some of the sentiments on here and sympathise. Ultimately those that have a job they enjoy and find rewarding have either worked it out and made changes or are lucky. Either of those will work but only one person can make the change.
Wow! A lot of cynicism here, or perhaps it is me that is naive. Over my lifetime, I have certainly experienced good bosses, bad bosses, good colleagues, bad colleagues, but by & large most of us started at the bottom, often doing menial stuff, but everyone generally expected to get experience, be promoted, look out for your fellow workers, etc., and it seemed to work.
I have noticed among my offspring that expectations seem to be a bit unrealistic, start work, become an executive within months/buy a house much like your parents with all new whiteware etc/ holiday overseas, etc..
I must admit we have been taken in by the socialist rhetoric to an unhealthy degree..ie, don't worry, your government will look after all the hard stuff. I don't underrate the huge difficulties facing the younger folk, especially getting a roof over their heads. But I do believe the worst thing that happened with covid pandemic was a belief, heavily promoted by the media, that the challenges ahead were so daunting, that only the government could rescue you, and of course you have a human right to a warm dry home, food on the table, so don't worry if getting all this is too hard, "we" will sort it for you.
No denying difficulties and some real pain, but believing that any government will smooth all problems, ...is little more than a scam which can only result in tears.
To be honest, this sounds more like a perspective steeped in generational preconceptions (or talkback radio discussions) than accurately in touch with what people are actually discussing or up to in younger generations in the workplace. I work with many from younger generations and read their perspectives more widely and there's massive motivation and work ethic. Just not where conditions and leadership are rubbish.
Some of it is how the nature of work has changed.
My views are somewhat prehistoric, because most of my living has come from generating a volume of work, weight of produce, square meters, that sort of thing. Super binary stuff, you have either succeeded in generating X amount of product at Y price, or you have not.
Many jobs are not like this, so the parameters for achieving or not achieving become somewhat arbitrary.
It is just my anecdote, but people who can consistently turn out the requisite volume at a reasonable quality level are becoming rarer to come by. They also are usually (but not obviously always) rewarded for this ability, I have seen a lot of fairly unexceptional Forest Gump types end up doing pretty well in life despite themselves.
Hard pinning down one specific reason for this change, but there are many.
I spent my working life in chemical manufacturing companies (4 including 2 multinationals), from the factory floor to the boardroom. Everyone knew every day whether we were doing a good job or not. With allowances & penal rates (multishift operations) the factory workers base pay was above the NZ median income, then there was additional overtime for coverage training SL AL etc.
Well yeah, people seemed to equate their working day with a certain understanding of how they were paying for their salary.
Now it's moving towards how little to get away with. Kinda harder to generate any sort of surplus in life with that approach. But you get by, one day at a time.
Considering that many workplaces outright refused WFH and other arrangements until Covid happened, I'd say businesses are finally reaping the rewards of decades of inflexibility and expecting to eat into more and more of an employee's personal time through things like later hours and rigid demands around commuting, while not coming to the party in terms of better wages that match living costs or fringe benefits to help offset it.
It's not leaving the house at 530am to be able to leave early enough to only spend an hour in the evening commute on the way home. It's basically three hours a day back that you don't get paid for. It was something that many companies swore couldn't be done and wouldn't work until they literally did not have a choice.
And guess what, it turns out it was possible the whole time. Throw in rising fuel costs, increasing congestion and other things like sports pick-ups and drop-offs and suddenly you're talking tens of thousands of dollars a year of unpaid time related to work that you suddenly have back.
Exactly, a boom and bust is as natural as the four seasons. We need a good downturn to clean out the mal investment. The heart of this problem is central banks and the monetary system. The banksters make things worse not better. If too much debt caused the problem, how will more debt make it better? It’s time for monetary reform.
Businesses would do the same to you in a heartbeat pay you the minimum that they can to retain you. If they replace you with someone cheaper overseas they would. Its just people waking to companies not being loyal to them so why should they be loyal to the company.
Seriously, I work to live, not live to work.
Yup, and if wages for a decent week's work had kept pace with actual living costs incurred by employees, we wouldn't have a housing affordability issue.
Throw in the general unwinding of redundancy, family medical insurance, company cars and other such perks over the last few decades and I'd be surprised if the actual lot of most professionals has improved, if at all, until the advent of WFH post-Covid.
Very 1970s. Inflation does that. It makes everything seem hopeless. You can never afford to buy a house, you are just on a treadmill.
How did it come to this?
Maybe it is just the cyclical nature of life. A country goes through a period of growth, then a period of decline and then, eventually, a period of growth again.
All the way through the long years of decline our dear tyrant leaders desperately search for the magic elixir that will re-ignite growth. Yet, each magic elixir turns out to be a scam, easily sold to our gullible and desperate leaders. Thus, all their plans turn to dust and only serve to cause yet more grief, by turning a difficult period into a catastophe by lengthening and deepening the decline.
Stress hits people differently. But having a 25 year mortgage and a 1 year work contract doesnt help.
The sooner that employers treat people like people instead of do it or your fired, the better'
It does get better - when the mortgage is paid off and your retired - but then you find that many health aspects are denied to older people.
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