Quiet quitting – shortcut to work-life integration or fast-track to career suicide?

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet, especially LinkedIn, recently, you will have seen plenty of content about quiet quitting – but is it a shortcut to work-life integration or a fast-track to career suicide?  

The answer, as you can imagine, is not straight-forward.  

What is quiet quitting? 

The concept is new to me and not necessarily something I am hearing from clients, which leaves me wondering whether it’s been created by media hype or is actually happening. Regardless, it’s worth knowing what quiet quitting means.  

In contrast to the actual phrase, quiet quitting doesn’t mean walking out on your job without telling anyone. It’s simply a term for doing what you’re contracted to do, and no more. Some might call that working to rule – which has slightly more unionised connotations, but means essentially the same thing.  

Heralded as the death of hustle culture, someone who is quiet quitting will leave or stop work after they’ve done their contracted hours, not take on any additional projects or responsibilities, and will simply deliver what’s in their job description.  

It’s not the same as under-performing – you still need to do your job. But there’s no over-performing either.  

What are the benefits of quiet quitting or working to rule? 

For many, the pandemic caused a huge re-evaluation of what matters in life, with the Great Resignation in America a symptom of people deciding to make some changes. Quiet quitting is the younger sibling of the great resignation, seeming to stem from a desire to work to live, rather than live to work. You could think of it as the shortcut to better work-life integration – getting the proportions of work and life right for you.  

Clearly the benefits of only working your contracted hours if you’ve previously worked many more are both for your mental health, and in having the time back to do other things you choose to – whether that’s pursue a hobby, spend time with friends and family, or find time to exercise. 

People with chronic conditions such as ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome have also pointed out that quiet quitting is the only option which allows them to function at all, due to how excessively tired they can get from simply doing the basics.  

Are there any disadvantages to adopting a quiet quitting approach? 

This depends on your approach to work. Many people of my generation were focused on a five- or ten-year plan, with life milestones set out, which included how much they would earn or perhaps what their job title would be at key points. Work was about progression, moving up, getting that next promotion and increasing your wage to enable a certain standard of living. So often there was an acceptance that you had to work hard and do the extra stuff to make any of that happen.  

Quiet quitting could mean you turned down the opportunity to work on an extra project that could have been a way of broadening your skills. Some might see it as the fast-track to career suicide.  

You could miss out on meeting new people and broadening your network, which might lead to different opportunities – sideways as well as upwards – in your working life. There may be a risk of others with less years in the working bank than you taking better-paid jobs, or it might become harder to get a new job if you eventually decide you want one without a diversity of experience. If you’re okay with that, then quiet quitting might be a working approach for you. These are all possibilities, not facts though, so there’s still a case that says you can achieve just as much without going above and beyond. 

Many people now see work as a means to facilitating the life they want, rather than as the major purpose. People say it’s about the current generation of young people, but in practice, there’s no age barrier to deciding to make work a minor factor in your life. For a long time, I’ve worked with people who want to edit their working life to make room for other things – whether that’s caring for elderly parents, volunteering, or finding more time for something else they get true fulfilment from.  

What should managers and organisations do about quiet quitting? 

This comes down to organisational culture and understanding that people don’t want to feel overworked and exhausted. Creating a culture of setting healthy boundaries and, as managers, understanding each of your team as individuals – including what people find important outside of work – are the best routes to helping people create a healthy work-life integration.  

If you’re seeing a lot of people work as if they are quietly quitting, it might be you have a problem with engagement – do people feel emotionally connected to your organisation? Do they share your values and your vision of the future? Are they involved or engaged with your strategy and confident in how their role contributes to success? 

Or maybe you need to focus more on your people’s wellbeing, overtly talking about it as an important factor and highlighting what you do to support people.  

Ultimately, finding a healthier blend of how much we work and how much time we have to do other things can only be better for us as individuals. The challenge for companies is how to integrate this new, empowered section of the workforce who will no longer accept that the only way to be is to work longer hours, put in extra effort, and volunteer for every additional project.  

So whether you view quiet quitting as the shortcut to work-life integration, the fast-track to career suicide or a media-driven fad, the fact is you’ll need plans to deal with people in your teams who want to work that way. As a good leader, regardless of which trends come and go, you need to know your people, talk to them regularly to understand their needs and priorities, and agree expectations.   

For a conversation about how to achieve your best work-life blend, get in touch to book a free introductory chat by emailing meg@megburtoncoach.co.uk  

Featured image courtesy of: https://unsplash.com/@whoisdenilo