I don't think the numbers are likely to have changed recently.
Most people in the vast corporate bureaucracies do very little work. Large groups of people are just absurdly dysfunctional, and when you work at a large company for long enough, you realize it's not worth fighting the culture to try to accomplish ambitious goals.
And you know what? The world keeps turning. Apparently everything is just fine if most people contribute very little at work.
Isn’t quite quitting just refusing to go above and beyond? Simply working the required hours and going home? Pretty sure that’s what we should have been doing all along.
It's like being in a union job but without the union benefits to the worker. But you do with the minimum you can get away with because although the prospects for a bad job market are high, there are currently few takers for open positions, so your employer will stick with you because your preplacement will likely be as unmotivated.
I think this bodes ill for Basic Income --it looks like it totally demotivates people and people are more than willing to "just get by" and then not pursue "their true intellectual pursuits".
I honestly dont see how this relates to basic income. Of course people dont want to work more than the bare minimum, work sucks for 95 percent of the population.
That would be true if work actually mattered for the majority of the population. Most work is just there to make someone else richer, not progress humanity in anyway.
Oh no! It's a plague that's spreading! (and not something that's been the norm without a name for decades). Better stop it quick corporations! Make things worse for your employees to punish them, that'll make them stop not volunteering for 60 hour weeks and every bullshit "not in your job description" project your middle managers come up with!
> “quiet quitters” [...] meaning they fulfill their job description but [...]
No. There is no room for a "but" there. Calling people "quitters" for doing their job is ridiculous. If you need your workers to do more than their contract says, change their contract. If they don't want that, pay them more. If you don't want to pay them more money for more work, sucks for you I guess.
Right? This whole framing of it as "quiet quitting" is intentional to make the workers look bad. This is "work to rule"[1] and it's interesting even this name is seen as a form of protest when it should be the norm.
According to the data this article is based on [1] (shown in chart form with a handy "Get the data" button to download a CSV), at least half the workforce has been neither "engaged" nor "actively disengaged" - a state we're now calling "quiet quitting" - since at least 2000, and 2022's 50% is an all time low point that we've been at since 2020. Quiet quitting may be real, but it's only a trend if you were ignoring it for the past two decades.
Yes. I'm fully convinced that there exist internal docs outlining how to make this term go viral and which palms to grease to make it show up in headlines like this.
We should stop using the term "quiet quitting" without also including the phrase "is your patriotic duty".
"Gallup says one effective intervention to boost engagement is for managers to have at least one in-depth conversation per week with each team member that lasts 15 to 30 minutes."
Often the manager is the number one reason people are demotivated, so that suggestion might backfire completely.
Personally, I don't mind routine checkups from management. The leading cause of detachment for me is tasks and meetings that generate no business value taking up an inordinate amount of time. If it takes more time to talk about the work I'm going to be doing than the amount of time it takes to actually do it, that's an issue.
> You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?
I'm happy to see almost all the comments calling this out. I feel like it's propaganda that likely would've worked before our highly connected modern age.
My favorite response is folks instead calling out "quiet firing", which is the majority of jobs where you can never move up beyond a 3% raise if you're lucky.
I love how the media re-branded "doing your job" to "quiet quitting". What the heck is going on? When I first saw the term "quiet quitting", I assumed it meant literally that, Office Space style, but what it actually means is "doing the job I'm paid to do". How ridiculous.
Speaking of Office Space, the way it's branded in this article reminds me of the "flair" scene.
Manager: "We need to talk about your job performance."
Employee: "Really? I'm performing all the tasks and responsibilities I was hired to do."
Manager: "Well, okay. Those are the minimums, okay?"
Employee: "Okay..."
Manager: "Now, you know it's up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Or... well, like Brian, for example, has the responsibilities of a Senior Dev for half the salary. And he has a terrific smile."
Employee: "Okay. So you... you want me to take more responsibilities?"
Manager: "Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to work more and we encourage that, okay? You don't want to be a quiet quitter, do you?"
Seems like a bit of cognitive dissonance here where the same people that seemingly constantly push the idea of remote work and how it supposedly doesn't affect their productivity and they work just as well/hard as in the office, yet at the same time those same people are also saying that this "quiet quitting" is a normal state of affairs, especially since the advent of remote work, that they're not going to stop doing?
I manage a team at work and I don't expect my team members to do more than paid to do. But I'm probably strange in that I will instruct my team members to not work weekends.
There's no point in managing people if you hate the person and love the worker.
Seems like all of this is just another way to make people work harder for less.
Now using a term that describes someone just doing there job as 'quiting' surely in a lot of jobs, in the capitalist system, the real goal should be as little as you need to do to satisfy the requirement of the role.
This does not mean being lazy, this does not mean not doing work, it means doing your job, doing what you are paid for, but why do anything else unless there is some benefit to you? Either you enjoy it, you learn from it, or you get paid for it, else don't do it.
37 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 89.2 ms ] threadMost people in the vast corporate bureaucracies do very little work. Large groups of people are just absurdly dysfunctional, and when you work at a large company for long enough, you realize it's not worth fighting the culture to try to accomplish ambitious goals.
And you know what? The world keeps turning. Apparently everything is just fine if most people contribute very little at work.
Glad they were willing to put this in writing.
I think this bodes ill for Basic Income --it looks like it totally demotivates people and people are more than willing to "just get by" and then not pursue "their true intellectual pursuits".
What an odd way to say "refusing to do work you're not being compensated to do".
No. There is no room for a "but" there. Calling people "quitters" for doing their job is ridiculous. If you need your workers to do more than their contract says, change their contract. If they don't want that, pay them more. If you don't want to pay them more money for more work, sucks for you I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
[1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/398306/quiet-quitting-real....
We should stop using the term "quiet quitting" without also including the phrase "is your patriotic duty".
> You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair, like your pretty boy over there, Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
My favorite response is folks instead calling out "quiet firing", which is the majority of jobs where you can never move up beyond a 3% raise if you're lucky.
It’ll probably still work, just with specific demographics.
Manager: "We need to talk about your job performance."
Employee: "Really? I'm performing all the tasks and responsibilities I was hired to do."
Manager: "Well, okay. Those are the minimums, okay?"
Employee: "Okay..."
Manager: "Now, you know it's up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Or... well, like Brian, for example, has the responsibilities of a Senior Dev for half the salary. And he has a terrific smile."
Employee: "Okay. So you... you want me to take more responsibilities?"
Manager: "Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to work more and we encourage that, okay? You don't want to be a quiet quitter, do you?"
Employee: "Yeah, yeah."
Manager: "Okay. Great. Great. That's all I ask."
There's no point in managing people if you hate the person and love the worker.
Now using a term that describes someone just doing there job as 'quiting' surely in a lot of jobs, in the capitalist system, the real goal should be as little as you need to do to satisfy the requirement of the role.
This does not mean being lazy, this does not mean not doing work, it means doing your job, doing what you are paid for, but why do anything else unless there is some benefit to you? Either you enjoy it, you learn from it, or you get paid for it, else don't do it.