Aug. 25, 2022 "Stop calling it 'quiet quitting' when really it just means doing your job": Today I found this article by Jo Constanz on the Financial Post:
Don’t call it “quiet quitting.”
That’s the battle cry from a growing chorus of voices on social media including r/antiwork, a subreddit for work grievances that counts more than two million members.
Redditors on the forum argue that calling the phenomenon any variety of “quitting” implies employees are acting badly,
when in reality the viral term simply means fulfilling the job description and setting healthy boundaries.
Posters on r/antiwork, which took off during the pandemic with the motto “unemployment for all, not just the rich,” blame the media for frenzied coverage of a concept that should be considered the norm, not a scandalous new trend.
Others see the new catchphrase as a tool employers may use against employees for not doing more work than their contract (and level of compensation) stipulates.
Memorable expressions have cachet, though, and so the race is on to coin the winning replacement.
One of the most commonly suggested: “Act your wage.”
There’s also “quiet firing,” when bosses make their workers’ lives miserable but stop short of actually firing them.
The internet has been flooded with explanations and debates about so-called quiet quitting, the new buzzword for doing your job as described.
Enthusiasts describe the mentality as a stealth retreat from the hustle culture that dominated the pre-pandemic era.
Pushback against the latest workplace buzzword is mounting, and not just on Reddit. Commentary on Twitter has pointed out how quiet quitting is a confused, flawed expression.
On TikTok, Shini Ko, 28, agrees that the term is problematic.
“The idea of quitting hustle culture
and not going above and beyond
is basically having a healthy work-life boundary.
I just don’t think that the term quiet quitting is an appropriate term for it because it sounds negative,” she said in an interview.
“It’s dangerous rather than empowering.”
Ko is based in eastern Ontario and works as a software developer to pay the bills and fund her passion project:
Bao Bao, a quarter-acre organic farm she started last year that specializes in Asian-heritage vegetables.
Ko notes setting clear boundaries at work doesn’t mean you’re not doing your job.
“Farming is expensive, and I couldn’t have started my farm without my tech salary,” she said.
“It’s really important for me to keep that in mind because at the end of the day, I still need to do my job right.”
For Rahaf Harfoush, an anthropologist who studies digital and work-life culture, the discussion around the word choice should be as much a part of the debate as whether quiet quitting is a good idea or not.
“The actual term itself is an unintentional, very revealing, vocabulary choice about hustle culture in and of itself,” she said in an interview.
The term exposes the internal conflict people face when it comes to setting work-life boundaries. “With quiet quitting, there’s almost like a shame and people admitting it, because if there wasn’t, we wouldn’t call it quiet quitting.”
Harfoush’s published a three-year study on hustle culture, Hustle and Float, that explores the ways in which workers remain deeply enmeshed in the ideals
of sacrifice,
giving it your all
and exceeding expectations
— even as this can result in
illness,
exhaustion
and burnout.
“Those are the ideals that are buried in our subconscious. So even though we might want work-life balance, when I hear people talk about quiet quitting, I’m like, ‘Ah, we haven’t quite let go of that yet,’” she said.
Commenters have also argued that all of the attention around quiet quitting says more about the extent to which companies depend on unpaid labour than about any individual employee’s work ethic.
As long as employees feel they have a shot of being rewarded for all their overtime, the hundreds (or thousands) of uncompensated hours could be seen as worth it.
Yet many workers, especially younger generations, don’t see it adding up anymore.
Wages aren’t keeping up with inflation while surging rents and the housing affordability crisis put both basic quality of life and major milestones out of reach.
Harfoush said that the quiet quitting trend (whether appropriately named or not) is part of a larger recalibration in the labour market.
“A lot of generational promises that have been made to people have been broken.
We were all told that if we worked really hard, and that if we went the extra mile, and that if we gunned for that promotion,
that the payoff would be
being able to afford a house,
being able to go to school,
being able to get a good job,
we would be able to move up,” she said.
“We were told that in exchange for the sacrifice in the labour market, there would be benefits.
And now what we’re seeing, at least with the millennials, is that those promises are not true.”
Stop calling it 'quiet quitting' when really it means doing your job | Financial Post
The term sounds about right to me. Any good employer wants/needs to get some value out of their employees to make hiring worthwhile.
Aug. 28, 2022 "'Quiet Quitting' an opportunity for employers to help reshape the workplace": Today I found this article by Adena Ali on BNN Bloomberg:
Conversations about so-called quiet quitting are everywhere these days, and one expert says it's a "profound opportunity" for Canadian companies to both get it right with employees and improve the work landscape for the future.
Melissa Nightingale, co-founder of management training firm Raw Signal Group, says smart organizations will take this moment to try to understand current workforce dynamics and to meet people where they are.
Though definitions vary, quiet quitting essentially refers to
clocking in when you're expected to,
doing your assigned tasks,
leaving on time
and not taking on extra work outside your regular hours.
It's not about slacking off on the job,
but rather setting boundaries and preventing burnout,
and not taking on additional work for which the employee isn't being paid.
In a tight job market, attraction and retention of talent take on increased importance since workers has more options.
Job vacancies are at a high, having climbed 3.2 per cent in June from a month earlier as employers were looking to fill more than one million positions for a third consecutive month.
Nightingale says employers need to
be upfront about expectations from the start
while making sure their employees are engaged,
feel motivated about their work
and have balance.
"You don’t want to be in a situation where you walk in every day and your boss has something else in mind but doesn’t tell you what it is. It’s not a good vibe," she says.
"You’re asking people to read your mind."
Ensuring employees have a clear sense of what success looks like in their roles is also important, she explains.
Most employees understand that the nature of the working world means sometimes unexpected tasks come up, or an important deadline means a project that was supposed to be completed earlier in the day ends up going into the night.
The problem is when those exceptions become an everyday thing that the employer didn't clearly outline during the hiring process,
or when an issue such as being perpetually understaffed was never brought up early on.
"You then have a job that is structured for burnout," Nightingale says.
Instances of burnout are on the rise across sectors, especially in health care and education, and it is driving workers out of these jobs.
Another part of the equation pushing workers toward quiet quitting is the wage component. While wages have been rising, they haven't been keeping up with the pace of inflation.
The average hourly wages of employees was up 5.2 per cent on a year-over-year basis in July, matching the pace of wage growth recorded in June, but that was still short of the inflation rate.
An additional variable in the current job market is the wave of layoffs in certain sectors like tech, cannabis and even the auto industry.
Andrea Bartlett, director of people operations at HR software solutions company Humi says this will add pressure to those employees remaining, potentially pushing some to burn out.
"I really wonder if those organizations have put time and focus into what kind recognition and rewards they’re allocating to the people who are left,
who have the same workload
and now significantly less resources," she says.
She adds that 'quiet quitting' puts the onus on the employee rather than the employer to get the ball rolling on ways to improve the work environment.
"If employers are paying attention to their employees, the hope is that this changes the conversation for the better," she says.
Raw Signal's Nightingale says the last two years have been "such a push-pull" in terms of who has the power to reframe what work is, adding that many employees don't want to return to pre-pandemic norms.
"The pulse of what they’re trying to say isn’t that they don’t want to work, it’s,
'We don’t want to work in the same way we’ve always worked, and we’re looking for something a little bit different,'" she says.
