Quiet quitting, a term coined to describe the act of doing the bare minimum of work, erupted on the scene last year, partly driven by social media. A recent survey in Belgium looked into whether this is a real issue for companies or just another buzzword.
The term was bandied around at the end of the summer holidays last year. At the start of September, the interest in "quiet quitting" visibly soared on Google Trends after it took off on TikTok in a video by content creator Zaiad Khan, who noted it was a "rejection of hustle culture and a reclaiming of work-life balance," which grew in importance as a result of the pandemic.
This resulted in people sharing their thoughts and experiences on social media, with articles and blogposts popping up trying to explain the phenomenon, and what managers and employers should do in response. Others scorned the word of the moment, such as Lake Superior State University which added the term to its 2023 Banished Words List.
Critics deemed the term "trendy but inaccurate", arguing that it does not refer to an "employee who inconspicuously resigns" but one who completes the minimum requirements for a position. Some even asserted that it is "nothing more than companies complaining about workers refusing to be exploited."
Presence in Belgium
HR services group Liantis recently surveyed 1,568 entrepreneurs, asking questions about their employees' motivation in the autumn of 2022 with the aim of understanding if the phenomenon is really alive in the workplace.
It showed that more than half (55.7%) of employers state that their employees "rarely, if ever, want to take on extra tasks, in addition to their regular duties." When focusing on this figure, defenders of the term could argue that quiet quitting is indeed prevalent among employees.
"Among the employers who identify this, 41.7% indicate that this occurs mainly among employees younger than 30," Bernd Carette, senior manager Liantis Consult, said. Meanwhile, 42.9% of respondents didn't see a real difference among age groups, while 15.4% indicated that the phenomenon is mainly present among employees aged 50 or over.
Disconnected, but committed
However, the survey also revealed that this does not necessarily mean that employees are less engaged, as 81.7% of surveyed employers say that their employees "usually to always" show commitment to what is happening within their organisation, meaning employees do care about their company.
Meanwhile, most employers indicated that the majority of their staff rarely or never check emails outside working hours or still answer phones, but stressed that this type of deconnection was welcomed. Additionally, almost all (93.1%) of respondents noted their employees are (almost) always collegial.
"Commitment and collegiality are different from working more than what is contractually stipulated. In light of rising burnout rates, it is not necessarily a bad thing for employees to monitor their limits better," Carette said. "Our survey shows that guarding those limits as an employee is not at the expense of commitment to the company, quite the contrary."
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Carette stressed that, rather than getting hung up on social media fads, companies should instead focus on other social trends such as an ageing population, which means that the tight labour market is "here to stay" and offering flexibility and taking employee expectations into account is therefore even more vital.
"It is more beneficial for an employer to have committed and productive employees who take on extras when needed while also watching over their work-life balance, than to have jaded employees who structurally bear much more responsability than is good for them," he concluded.
