By Caterina Apostolakos

The current climate and hustle culture across many workplaces both within Australia and around the world, have fostered immense workloads and uninspiring working conditions, rendering many employees simply burnt out. However, instead of heading to the door and quitting their jobs, employees are turning to quiet quitting.

In this article, we explain what this movement is, its three distinct approaches, and how employers can use this as a precipice for cultural change.

So, what is quiet quitting?

Quiet quitting, contrary to its name, doesn’t involve a resignation on the part of the employee. Rather, it refers to the notion of not going above and beyond in your place of employment. It suggests that those sufficiently fed up with their consistently demanding workloads, simply choose to become disengaged with their role or are refusing to partake in the parts of their role they may deem overwhelming, toxic, or unsatisfying. Simply, ‘quiet quitting’ is when a tired, overworked, burnt-out employee only does the job they are paid to do without taking on any extra duties or participating in extracurriculars at work.

It’s important to note that there isn’t just one way to quietly quit. There are three distinct approaches to this trend that represent very different attitudes on part of the worker. These are:

1. Checking out

Checking out refers to those employees who actively choose to disengage from their day-to-day duties, and instead only complete the bare minimum required of them. Aside from gambling on how long they can get away with doing this, it’s also a key indicator of low morale, poor company culture, and little to no job satisfaction.

2. Going on a (partial) strike

This approach differs in nature from the seemingly passive-aggressive disengagement. Rather, the employee usually refuses to do work after hours or engage in tasks outside of their job description.

Ultimately, this approach is a more assertive effort to call to attention the value-add of the employee and the efforts they expend, and to seek appropriate recognition and compensation for.

The end goal is to put pressure on employers to set clear role expectations and reimburse employees accordingly.

3. Taking charge

Perhaps the most positive of the three approaches, taking charge represents an assertion of control and choice to achieve the seemingly elusive healthy work-life balance. Rather than adopting the approach of checking out characterised by doing the bare minimum, employees learn to say no and set their own boundaries where necessary to maintain a beneficial working life. There’s still engagement on the part of the employee and a commitment to providing value within the boundaries of a sustainable role.

The key objective is to self-manage work-life balance, health, well-being, and relationships cohesively.

Cultural change: how should employers manage it?

These large-scale global work movements have been fuelled by inflexible workplaces and consistently high workloads and represent an invaluable opportunity for companies to lead the pack in creating more sustainable working environments.

• Reflect on the type of work employees are doing

Employees going above and beyond in their efforts and staying back to do two to three hours of overtime a night, may not always be doing the necessary work. It’s important to differentiate between work critical to their role and the company, and busy work which isn’t necessarily crucial to the business.

It is important to assess whether the work employees spend so long putting their efforts into is high-value-adding work, or just work designed to keep them doing something all the time. On this note, businesses should assess how to reduce the amount of unnecessary labour.

If employees feel they’re being utilised productively, there will likely be an increase in both staff morale and overall job satisfaction.

• Make sure to adequately resource your teams

Burnout arises when employees are overworked, stressed, and lack a healthy work-life balance.

One of the biggest factors contributing toward creating a sustainable workload for employees is ensuring there are enough employees to do the job. This alleviates the added pressures placed on employees where they feel they need to work harder and longer hours because if they don’t do the work, then who will?

The saying many hands make light work still rings true, and ultimately encourages teamwork, makes for more productive work, and creates sustainable workloads.

• Making the work more exciting

Mundane or repetitive work is likely to render employees disengaged from their roles. Where possible, it is important to offer employees the opportunity to collaborate on different tasks, work with different people, and overall allow them to utilise their skill sets in new ways. Keeping these things in mind is critical when creating new roles and job descriptions within the business.

• Incentivising employees

Employees who are jumping on the quiet quitting trend, often feel that their hard work and efforts aren’t being recognised and subsequently, they aren’t being adequately remunerated.

Whilst salary increases or pay raises may be difficult to implement due to increasing financial pressures, there may be other incentives that employers can offer their employees.

This could involve things such as consulting employees about their career progression pathways (with reasonable timelines) that align with their personal objectives, offering them different training and development opportunities, and even mentoring opportunities.

There are several layers and complexities behind the quiet quitting trend. However, unlike others, this movement likely won’t dissipate over the next few months or even the next year. Despite this, it isn’t something that should be feared, but rather it should act as a catalyst for creating more sustainable and positive working environments.

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Caterina Apostolakos is a Senior Workplace Relations Advisor at HR Assured. Caterina provides employment relations advice and support to our clients’ businesses on a wide range of matters.