Aug. 19, 2022 "Quiet quitting: What the workplace trend sweeping social media actually means": Today I found this article by Jessica Mundie on the National Post:
The idea is sweeping social media: “quiet quitting.” But for most advocates, the movement is quite different than what the name suggests.
This trend, which is growing especially on the social media app TikTok, has nothing to do with leaving your job.
Rather, it supports the idea of meeting expectations at work and nothing more — avoiding going above and beyond.
The divide is about whether this movement is suggesting
slacking off to the point of not getting work done,
or if it is just encouraging workers to fulfill the duties of their job description to the best of their abilities within normal working hours.
Some experts suggest it’s just
a controversial name for doing your job with healthy work-life boundaries,
while others say dedication is still important for advancing your career.
Developing a healthy work-life balance is important,
but going above and beyond in your work is not always a bad thing,
in fact having ambitious people on a team is important, said Mary Ann Baynton, workplace relations specialist and CEO of Mary Ann Baynton & Associates Corp.
“The problem comes when the going above and beyond is expected without compensation,” said Baynton.
If two people were to work the same job but one is very ambitious and works more hours for recognition,
the other should not be punished for just doing the work they were hired for, she said.
It is important, said Baynton, that employees are doing the work they were hired to do to the best of their abilities.
There’s another phrase in the conversation, too, and that one’s even more contentious:
“retire on the job” refers to someone who shows up to work just to slack off and ends up offloading duties on to their coworkers.
“They do not get the work that is expected of them complete,” she said.
Victoria Grainger, founder of Wellness Works Canada, a not-for-profit workplace health and performance association,
said the phenomenon of disengaging from one’s job has picked up pace and is disturbing in light of already dismal engagement rates.
“Employee engagement directly correlates with job performance,” she said, in an email.
“And if employers want healthy, performing organizations, they need to step up to the task of meeting employee needs.”
There is something to be said for going above and beyond in your work, said Grainger.
Savvy employers will notice this and provide
recognition,
reward,
compensation
and opportunities for advancement
that they deserve.
But, she said, it is also important for employees
to be vocal about their needs
and to set healthy boundaries that prevent harm to their psychological health.
Kelsea Warren, a workplace wellbeing coach and consultant, said she does not like the term “quiet quitting” for the ideology that it describes.
“It just puts a negative connotation around people doing their job descriptions,” she said.
The trend is not necessarily new, said Warren, who is pursuing a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology. The ideas behind work-to-rule and unionizing are similar to the quiet quitting ideology.
Warren said many times when people start a new job,
they are excited by their role,
engaged in the work,
and want feedback on their progress.
But when their hard work is not acknowledged by management,
all they are told is what they are doing wrong,
and job requirements keep changing,
the employee starts to feel less valuable.
“People are just not as motivated to continue going above and beyond when they’re not seeing any benefits of doing so,” said Warren.
This may appear to management or people on the outside of an organization as employees not doing their jobs because they are no longer exceeding expectations,
but in reality, they are just doing the minimum work they were hired to do, she said.
Quiet quitting is also about avoiding burnout, a state of total exhaustion caused by excessive stress, which became relevant especially during the pandemic.
“People who at one time felt being ambitious, having poor personal boundaries, and making work the centre of their life, have changed their mind,” said Baynton.
“Maybe their sole desire in life is not to achieve at work, maybe it is family, friends, or their health.”
There were also shifts in the way we work, said Warren. Jobs are more remote and there is no need to commute to an office every day.
“Work is important and work can be fun, I do believe that people should love their jobs,” she said.
“But post-pandemic I think people are realizing that there is more to life than just work.”
Some people on social media see this trend as overwhelmingly positive, like TikTok user Clayton Farris, who in a video said he still works just as hard and still gets just as much accomplished.
“I just don’t stress and internally rip myself to shreds,” he said, in his video.
Others, like user Shini Ko, who has a full-time job in tech while also running a farm in Perth, Ont., say quiet quitting has negative connotations as it suggests the idea of not going above and beyond is “quitting.”
In a video, Ko says there have been times in her career when she has gone above and beyond her job description and has “let work-related problems live rent-free in her brain.”
“But I don’t do that anymore because it’s so not worth it,” she said, in the video.
Ko said the idea of quiet quitting sounds like a “coping mechanism” and “disengaging.”
“I’m still showing up to my work,
I’m still putting in a fair amount of effort to do my job right,” she said, in the video.
“I’m just saying no to things that don’t bring value.”
Warren said that if employers see this trend happening in their workplace, they should look at what kind of processes and systems they have for wellbeing and engagement.
“I think identifying the values of the employees
and trying to help combat those misalignments
is important for organizations that want to keep talent,” she said.
Quiet quitting: The workplace trend that is sweeping social media | National Post
There are 149 comments:
"If two people were to work the same job but one is very ambitious and works more hours for recognition, the other should not be punished for just doing the work they were hired for, she said."
To recognize the hard work of one is now considered punishment for those who choose not to work hard - the very essence of equity. And, of course, our world is now full of reasons why you weren't recognized and not one of them involves your job performance. This will continue as long as the DIE industry remains so very lucrative, and receives such huge amounts of taxpayer dollars.
While people are clearly free to conduct themselves on the job as they wish, they need to understand that companies do not exist to provide them with easy, high-paying jobs with lots of benefits.
Companies exist to make a return on investment for their investors.
Employing people to do things is simply one of the means of achieving this.
Clearly the company will prefer to employ people who provide the best contribution to this objective. People who do the minimum with which they think that can get away will likely be viewed less favourably than people who go ‘above and beyond’ and should not be surprised if they receive fewer rewards or are even replaced.
Moreover, if it becomes more cost-effective to use automation to perform the functions of one or more employees, then ‘the company’ will be motivated to do that. The best protection against that is to ensure, by performance and attitude, that that motivation never materializes, or, if it does, that the employee is no longer in the job that will be replaced by automation, having demonstrated, by performance and attitude, his/her superior value-added resulting in promotion out of that job.
Aug. 24, 2022 "'Quiet quitting' isn't really quitting, but it is forcing employers to adapt": Today I found this article by Jenna Benchetrit on CBC news:
Clocking out at 5 p.m. on the dot, only doing your assigned daily tasks, limiting chats with colleagues and no working overtime.
These are the distinctive features of "quiet quitting," a term coined to describe how people are approaching their jobs and professional lives differently to manage burnout.
The phrase — which isn't actually intended to lead to a resignation — exploded into the popular lexicon last week when a TikTok video went viral.
"I recently learned about this term 'quiet quitting,' where you're not outright quitting your job, but you're quitting the idea of going above and beyond," creator Zaid Khan said in the video, which has since amassed 3.4 million views.
The phrase is resonating, too. While the words "quiet quitting" are loaded, evoking images of a slacker or ne'er-do-well for some, others say that the approach frees up time to spend with family and friends, or to take care of oneself.
In short, it's a renewed commitment to life beyond the workplace. But behind the trend is a starker reality.
Employees want to be fairly compensated for additional time and work, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates occupational burnout and mental health issues. The ball is squarely in the court of employers, managers and executives, experts say.
New buzzword, same gist
While the term "quiet quitting" may be a new invention, the mentality behind it is not.
The phrase "work to rule," for example, describes a labour action in which employees strictly perform the work laid out in their contract, without taking on additional work.
Meanwhile, the pejorative "retired in place" — or RIP — suggests that a worker is mailing it in, doing just the bare minimum to keep from getting fired as they wait out retirement benefits.
"I'm sort of chuckling over it because, to me, it's common sense," said Sarahrose Werner, a retired tax preparer in Saint John, who "quietly quit" herself roughly 30 years ago.
"I've learned from my own experience that … constantly going above and beyond may get you a few extra dollars if you're being paid hourly, but it does not necessarily win you the loyalty of your employer," Werner said.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a major economic movement, The Great Resignation, which saw people leaving their jobs or switching professions in droves, as they re-evaluated their relationship to work during a life-changing health crisis.
A May 2022 survey by RBC Insurance suggested that more than
one-third of recently retired Canadians aged 55-75 had retired sooner than they planned.
Another third decided to retire sooner because of the pandemic.
While Statistics Canada reported in March that a Great Resignation hadn't really taken off in this country, the agency said that the third quarter of 2021 saw a 60 per cent increase in job vacancies compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Both quiet quitting and The Great Resignation indicate a marked cultural shift from the early- and mid-2010s,
when "hustle culture" paved the way to "grinding" and "girl-bossing" — ideas that prioritized work over everything else,
with the belief that such effort made employees more desirable to managers,
therefore helping them climb up the corporate ladder faster
and generating more income.
As the pandemic shuffles along into its third year, experts say remote and hybrid models are here to stay, and employees are re-evaluating how much time they spend
commuting,
working overtime
and generally investing in low-pay, low-reward jobs.
"I think what's happening a lot is people — a lot of younger people in particular — are taking jobs that are more transactional," said
Tim Magwood, the CEO of 1-DEGREE/Shift, a human resources consulting firm in Toronto.
"So it's just about a job and pay, and there's no real learning," he said.
"There's no real sense of purpose."
Most employees have seen that they "work in systems" that do not reward constantly going above and beyond, said Karen K. Ho, a freelance business and culture reporter based in Richmond Hill, Ont.
"Hustle culture has been repeatedly shown to be only beneficial for
corporations and their managers,
through bonuses,
through increased productivity,
through increased revenue and profits and the like," said Ho.
The employees driving increased productivity at the lower level are making the same amount of money, she said,
all while being told that "the baseline for meeting expectations is exceeding expectations."
Onus is on employers
Some companies are requiring that employees return to working in the office, which in itself has become a point of contention. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for example, made headlines in June when he told company employees that they must return to the office or lose their jobs.
"We have seen that people can be productive at home," said Ho. "We have seen that it is beneficial for a lot of people who are
neurodivergent,
or have disabilities,
or even have caregiving responsibilities, whether it be elderly adults, like parents, or young children."
Werner, who chose to scale back in her 30s after a 50-to-60 hour work week left her mentally taxed, said an employer once suggested she bike and not walk to work so that she could put in more hours.
"This was long before anybody talked about work [and] used the term work-life balance," she said.
The term quiet quitting has also garnered criticism, even from those who generally favour the idea behind it, because it suggests that the employee is falling short, rather than the employer.
According to Ho, quiet quitting is a misnomer: It doesn't account for the fact that people are watching their grocery bills, fuel costs and housing prices go up, often without so much as a salary increase, she said.
"You're literally stagnating as a result of
not earning more,
not being promoted
— and that's why a lot of people are leaving jobs," she said.
Some employees are advocating for policies, benefits and working conditions that strengthen work-life balance.
During the pandemic, advocates in Ontario lobbied for a "right to disconnect" bill. Now in effect, the legislation obligates most employers to have a written policy, outlining how workers can disengage after hours.
But critics say it doesn't work as well as it should, with a glaring loophole that allows employers to take advantage by vaguely wording their policies.
Executives who expect employees to fit into rigid standards for work ethic after the pandemic-driven workplace shift are in for a rude awakening, according to Magwood.
"We really need to adapt, and one-size-fits-all just does not work anymore," he said.
Werner agrees that the pandemic has given people the space to rethink their lives.
"With the baby boomer generation retiring, there's simply fewer workers to take their places," she said. "I think young people are smart enough to realize that that puts their labour at a premium and that it gives them a bit more latitude in making choices."
'Quiet quitting' isn't really quitting, but it is forcing employers to adapt | CBC News
My opinion: I support work- life balance and being compensated well for my work.
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