What can we do about quiet (and noisy) quitting?

Manager: Why aren’t you working? Employee: I didn’t see you coming.

‘Quiet quitting’ may be a new term, made fashionable by social media over the past couple of years, but it is not a new phenomenon.

In this article, we explore the symptoms and causes, and the actions that HR can take to address this brake on organizational performance.

Passion or apathy

Most employers want their staff to be passionate about their work, to ‘go the extra mile’, ‘above and beyond’, to display ‘discretionary effort’ and ‘citizenship behaviors’.

Quiet quitting, on the other hand, means turning up for work, and doing only the bare minimum. As a CEO once told us, ‘We have lost too many people who are still with us’.

What proportion of your staff are ‘quiet quitters’? In its annual State of the Global Workplace Report 2023, Gallup, the opinion polling company, estimates that over half of the US workforce are quiet quitters.

A survey last year by the coaching organization BetterUp found that a third of UK employees are quiet quitters. This problem could apply to your organization, with consequences for productivity and overall performance.

The shock of the old

Most commentary suggests that the recent COVID-19 pandemic is to blame. However, the history of ‘not pulling one’s weight’ at work goes back much further than that.

In the early 20^th century, Frederick Taylor, ‘the father of scientific management’ complained about ‘systematic soldiering’ – the deliberate restriction of output by employees. This happened, he thought, due to group pressure and allowing workers to control their own pace.

Today, granting employees some autonomy at work is seen as beneficial, but is perhaps not widely practiced.

Around the same time, experiments by the French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann showed how individuals exert less effort when working as part of a group than when working alone. ‘The Ringelmann effect’ became known as ‘social loafing’. You can take it easy if you know that your colleagues are also on the job.

Fast forward to the 21^st century to find governments and employers focusing on ’employee engagement’. To be engaged is to be enthusiastic about work and to contribute willingly. The term was coined by William Khan in 1990.

Engagement was recognized in 2009 as a national priority by The McCleod Review which concluded that the UK had an ‘engagement deficit’ which was holding the economy back.

Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the global economy around $9 trillion a year in lost productivity.

How do we know?

There are many symptoms of quiet quitting (soldiering, loafing, disengagement).  These are well known, and are fairly easy to spot:

• Showing up but not speaking up.
• Drop in performance.
• Being late for meetings.
• Not being willing to arrive early or stay late.
• Lack of enthusiasm and initiative.
• Unwilling to take on extra tasks.
• Higher absenteeism and sick leave.
• Weak contributions to teamwork.
• Missing deadlines.
• Not sharing information.
• Being uncooperative.
• Zero or low levels of discretionary effort.
• Customer complaints about poor service.

In addition, if the views of your unhappy staff escape into the atmosphere through websites like Glassdoor, you will not be seen as a good employer. When this happens, you can expect to face recruitment difficulties.

You can readily detect these signs through several sources: management by walking around, informal corridor conversations, performance appraisals, exit interviews (if the right questions are asked), and employee surveys.

In addition, seek the views of your middle managers. They are closer to the action than the top team, and are often the first to hear about emerging problems and employee grumbles.

It is important to make time to observe, to listen to feedback from a variety of sources, and to take swift action when necessary.

Why does it happen?

The problem may lie with the individual. From time to time, many of us face personal and domestic problems which take our minds off work.

The pandemic experience seems to have encouraged some of us to rethink our priorities in life, with work moving lower down the list.

For example, some staff may have found that hybrid working improved their work-life balance, and that turning up at the workplace every day is no longer satisfying.

However, beware the fundamental attribution error: blaming the individual, while ignoring the context. Many of the causes of quiet quitting lie in the organization:

• Perceived inequity in pay and other conditions.
• Lack of development or career opportunities.
• Autocratic, micromanaging leadership style.
• Disregard for employee wellbeing.
• Skills and knowledge not being recognized, used, or developed.
• Boring, repetitive, meaningless work.
• No sense of purpose.
• Or, more likely, some combination of these factors.

Noisy quitting

There is a danger that the focus on quiet quitting diverts attention from those employees who do leave the organization – the ‘noisy quitters’. That would be unhelpful.

Staff who quit can often give valuable critical feedback on what is going wrong with employee well-being and motivation in an organization.

People change jobs for many reasons. But the underlying causes of noisy quitting are likely to be much the same as for quiet quitting.

This means that action to address a quiet quitting problem could help to reduce staff turnover, and improve motivation and performance across the board.

Remedies

To address the causes of quiet quitting (and noisy quitting), the obvious first step is to diagnose the cause, or causes, for individuals or groups in your organization.

Remember that this can apply to administrative, professional, technical, and managerial staff, at all levels, and not just the front line. You have several solutions:

• Offer personal support or counselling – use your judgement as to whether this can be provided in-house, or if external professional counselling would be more appropriate.
• Provide training and development for reskilling and upskilling. In the current climate of rapid technological change, you will probably be doing this anyway.  Reskilling existing staff, who already know the business, is usually quicker and less costly than bringing in new staff from outside. New hires may have the skills, but they will lack the organizational knowledge – ‘the way we do things around here’ – and take longer to get up to speed.
• Meet staff preferences for flexible, part time, or hybrid working – once again, you may be doing this already, having had experience during the pandemic. Some staff may welcome the chance to stay hybrid, or to go hybrid if they have not already done so. Hybrid working can benefit the organization (reduced office costs, for example) as well as benefitting staff.
• Review pay and conditions to identify and rectify inequities – perceived inequity can be just as powerful as actual discrepancies, and these issues need to be handled carefully. Removing inequities can improve recruitment and retention, as well as addressing quiet quitting.
• Offer management and supervisory training to promote supportive leadership styles – as mentioned earlier, front line and middle managers should be critical information sources, concerning quiet quitting, and other employee issues.  They need the skills to perform this information capture and feedback role sensitively and effectively.
• Redesign jobs to provide meaningful work with a sense of purpose – a good starting point is the ‘good work index’ designed by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development. This offers valuable advice on the design of interesting, enriched jobs as well as wider employment conditions.

These are not novel solutions for the quiet and noisy quitting problem. On the contrary, these are standard HR policies which are not difficult, time consuming, or costly to implement. Most of these ‘remedies’ should already be in place in organizations with HR departments. Any costs involved are likely to be more than offset by the benefits from a more skilled, motivated, engaged, and loyal workforce.

Staff expectations of work are not stable. The pandemic experience with hybrid working, for example, showed how yesterday’s needs can change rapidly, as people rethink their work-life priorities.

HR needs to keep up to date with these shifts in attitudes. This puts a premium on collecting regular feedback as discussed earlier. And HR policies and practices need to be flexible enough to deal with these changes.

Final thought

If you have a quiet quitting problem, addressing it should be business as usual for HR, using existing tools, but with real energy and focus. This does not involve a major transformational change program.

All types of quitting can be addressed with quick fixes. But unless the issues are confronted, the problem will persist for another century.