Quiet quitting is a trending phrase at the workplace and is an intimate approach by employees that exists in varying degrees. What is quiet quitting? It is the new phrase to describe when the employee decides to contribute only related to his / her task and withdraw from any other extra activities as a way to manage his work-life balance. In essence, the employee delivers his work but does not engage.

What is bad about it? It highlights the low level of engagement between the workplace and the employee. And, what is bad about that too? It leads to a lack of motivation for the employee, sours the relationship with colleagues, and starts growing like a weed in the workforce culture.

Employee-work engagement is not a well-defined expectation in the job role. But often the engagement is assessed through interpersonal social skills, participation in extracurricular activities like team events, and shouldering the workload beyond office hours. On the other hand, active disengagement stems from two reasons – the need to balance time for work and personal life and secondly to show dissonance if one doesn’t feel appreciated or rewarded enough.

Quiet quitting, in its own silent way, is a red flag in workplace culture. This threatens the role of HR managers who are dedicated to keeping employees engaged and motivated. Quiet quitting also points to team leaders’ ineffective management to some extent.  

On a lighter note, here is Aiyoo Shraddha

Poor folks, they had to go from where: diversity and inclusion to adversity and expulsion, you know, snap. Work from home, work from office, work for somebody else, just like that. And this after all those employee engagement activities to keep employees happy. Forget happy, they couldn’t keep employees. They should have focused on keeping employees no? This Happy Happiness is not there KRA, it is nobody’s KRA, it comes from within and not from we have six types of tea and four types of coffee, three types of water in our pantry. Some of the folks they laid off were so new, they didn’t get a chance to taste the six types of tea and the companies wanting to be families. “We are not a company we are a family.” Who started this confusion between hiring and adoption.You did not adopt me, you hired me.

How to avoid the urge to practice quiet quitting:

I was serving on the board of the Indian Advertising Association, India chapter and we were planning to host a program for the advertising fraternity. It was a few weeks of planning, approaching speakers, program hosts, and the works. During one of the board meetings, the program was removed from the calendar due to a lack of an appropriate date to host it. It was not that the calendar was packed like a compartment of the Mumbai local train during peak hours, but it was canceled because one board member was apparently cold about the idea and preferred to convey it through his lack of time as reason. The organizers first tried to work around his pain point and then grudgingly had to cancel their idea and its planning. I was spearheading the idea and was furious with how the meeting unfolded that day. That evening, seeing my frustration, a senior member of the board tapped my shoulder and said, “Vishakha, let go.”

Let go is a mantra that one must keep safe, to be used occasionally. You can’t let go of every event or opportunity but at the same time, you don’t need to engage in every little thing. Using ‘let go’ sometimes is a good way to manage your own expectations and disappointment. The discretion to know when to use it is like choosing which battle to fight and which to ignore.

If you have the urge to adopt quiet quitting, you must understand that quiet quitting is as harmful as sitting. Sitting is considered the new smoking because sitting for long hours impacts muscles, insulin resistance, etc leading to severe health hazards. It is advisable to bring movement. Similarly, quiet quitting is silently harmful. It makes you cold & frozen in relationships. A complete disengagement deprives you of motivation and enthusiasm. While this disengagement initiates with non-work related activities at the workplace, it eventually trickles to work life.

How to navigate through quiet quitting as a team leader

To manage a team from quiet-quitting, there are two conscious changes that team leaders can adopt: one is attention to time management and the other is attention to appreciation.

1.Random act of appreciation:

The employee of the month is nice, but what is nicer is being kind and appreciative even on a day-to-day basis. Everyone on the team has some strength, and focusing on that strength and encouraging and appreciating as a regular conversation is a simple way to keep people motivated and engaged.

2.Attention to time:

When the work spills over office hours regularly, it is time to question the process and work allocation. Less is more is a philosophy that leaders can encourage to clear off more time for work by reducing participation in certain meetings and engagement activities. Random permitted absence from an unnecessary meeting or an activity brings twofold joy – it not only frees the time for more important things, it also highlights the empathetic side of leadership.

It is a worrisome, scary feeling to be the leader of a team that has a majority of people who are quiet quitters. It is not that they do not do the work, it is the disengagement that is a slow kill to the culture.

While quiet quitting is new to the workplace vocabulary, partial disengagement by employees is a common practice. An open conversation about quiet quitting, attention to time management, and random acts of appreciation by leaders will keep the red flag away.

‍