The pandemic brought with it lots of long-lasting changes to the world of business and work. One of these is quiet quitting, which is still a confusing subject for many business owners and leaders. This article will cover the topic in depth, exploring everything from what is quiet quitting to how you can prevent it in your team.
What is Quiet Quitting?
Let’s start off with the basics of the concept: what is quiet quitting? Simply put, it’s when a professional stops being enthusiastic about their work. It’s when they stop putting in extra effort into their jobs and do only what’s expected of their titles. They avoid so-called “citizenship behaviors”—meaning they no longer wish to go above and beyond. Quite quitters settle for the minimum requirements instead.
Many leaders believe that quiet quitting and doing the bare minimum can be summed up in one word: laziness. However, the concept is more complicated than that. It represents a shift in one’s priorities and feelings about their work. To demonstrate this more clearly, let’s take a look at a few examples of quiet quitting.
Examples of Quiet Quitting
Depending on the professional and their situation, quiet quitting can look quite different. Here are a few common examples of quiet quitting that you may encounter in your team as a business owner:
- An employee declines an extra assignment, like covering for a missing colleague in an emergency.
- Staff members avoid team-building activities and meetings.
- A worker leaves at the end of their schedule when they have unfinished work for the day.
- Employees don’t respond to important messages outside of work hours, like during an emergency.
While these are common signs of quiet quitting, it’s important to remember that these scenarios can be something else: boundaries.
The Distinction Between Quiet Quitting and Setting Healthy Boundaries
The line between healthy boundaries and the lack of effort that comes with quiet quitting can be blurry in many cases. Lots of things can swing the situation from one concept to the other—like the size of the extra task in question. Healthy boundaries between one’s personal and work life are important for a wide variety of reasons—chief among which is the main cause of quiet quitting: professional satisfaction.
What Causes Quiet Quitting?
The main reason why quiet quitting happens is pretty self-explanatory. Low professional satisfaction rates temper employee enthusiasm and cause them to deprioritize their work—even beyond healthy work-life balance levels.
Low satisfaction in one’s work can have many causes of its own. One of the most common ones is lacking appreciation for one’s workplace efforts—including those above and beyond actions.
Is Quiet Quitting out of the Ordinary?
While the term “quiet quitting” is fairly new—having emerged after the pandemic at the start of the decade—many argue that the concept itself isn’t. In fact, there’s data to suggest that it’s also not out of the ordinary. According to Gallup’s 2022 article on quiet quitting, quiet quitters make up at least 50% of the workforce in the US.
Consequently, statistically speaking, half of your staff are “quiet quitters”. Having said that, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to improve these metrics. While you can’t change how your employees feel about their jobs, you can make an impact in several ways. One such way is to improve your staff’s professional engagement rates.
The Link Between Quiet Quitting and Professional Engagement
While it seems simple on the surface, the link between quiet quitting and professional engagement can be complicated. You may think that a quiet quitter is disengaged from their work completely. However, in the vast majority of cases, this isn’t true. While they’re certainly not engaged in their responsibilities, they’re also not disengaged. If they still complete their work and only skip the citizenship behaviors, they’re somewhere in between.
The Impact of Quiet Quitting on Your Business
Before we cover how you can prevent the phenomenon, let’s quickly address the effects of quiet quitting on your business. The main ones we’re going to cover are:
- Lower Productivity
- Lower Employee Retention
- Higher Business Costs
Lower Productivity
When your employees stop going above and beyond, their productivity will decrease. They’re likely to start working at a slower pace, reducing their output. Another way their productivity will suffer is in terms of creativity. A quiet quitter will be less willing to come up with new or unique solutions to problems, as they won’t care to do so.
Lower Employee Retention
As mentioned previously, employees who quiet quit are dissatisfied with their work. Consequently, they’re likely to be actively looking for better opportunities to fulfill their professional ambitions. Low talent retention can become especially problematic over the long run, increasing recruitment costs for your business.
Higher Business Costs
The last two points we discussed combine to result in increased costs for your business. You’ll not only have to spend more on hiring-related tasks but also on your day-to-day operations. This will decrease your company’s profitability, slowing down its growth momentum.
Preventing Quiet Quitting with Time Tracking Software
There are lots of ways to reduce the prevalence of quiet quitting in your team. One of the best ones uses feature-rich time tracking software—like WebWork. Using tracked data provided by these apps, you can ensure your team members are satisfied with their work. The main steps to doing so are:
- Setting Clear Goals and Expectations
- Rewarding Your Staff Appropriately
- Detecting and Preventing Overworking
Set Clear Goals and Expectations
Setting clear goals is vital to staying organized in any professional environment. It will allow your team members to prioritize their tasks correctly and always be aware of what assignments to work on next. Doing so is easy with high-quality time tracking apps that offer project and task management functionality. These will let you define targets for both individual team members and your company as a whole.
Besides this, you must also pay attention to a part of setting goals and expectations that’s often overlooked: periodically reviewing them. It’s important to continually assess which parts of your team’s work are their core responsibilities. What might be considered citizenship behavior at the beginning of one’s tenure might become a part of their core work a while later. Making sure these are clearly defined will help reassure your employees they are growing in their careers.
Rewarding Staff Appropriately
As discussed earlier, one of the core reasons why quiet quitting happens in the first place is subpar recognition of one’s efforts. Using time tracking software, it’ll be easy for you to identify the top performers in your team. You can do this in many ways, like using app and website usage and task management data. You’ll then be able to reward their efforts proportionally to their work, including with accurate raise calculations and more.
Detecting and Eliminate Overworking
While it may seem counterintuitive that overworking can result in quiet quitting, it’s possible over time. Overworking will lead to burnout if left unaddressed—which will have effects very similar to that of quiet quitting. Fortunately, detecting work overload can be pretty easy with the right time tracker. High-quality apps like WebWork have dedicated work-life balance tracking features. These show you the work-life balance of each of your employees, helping you distribute your team’s workload evenly.
In addition to this, WebWork even offers the ability for you to disable tracking outside of work hours. This way, your staff will be discouraged from working outside of their schedules.
Concluding Thoughts
Following the events of the pandemic, quiet quitting emerged as a new, trendy concept. People across the globe use it to communicate their dissatisfaction with work—which, unlike the concept, isn’t something new. By understanding why quiet quitting happens, you can create a workplace where employees feel valued and motivated. Tools like high-quality time trackers and strategies like fair rewards and recognition can help with this immensely. Taking these steps will ensure your team stays engaged and committed to your company’s success.
