Can Employee Engagement Overcome Quiet Quitting?

Is “quiet quitting” really a thing? Sure. Worker wants to reclaim the scheduling flexibility they enjoyed at the height of the pandemic, and this is leading them to withdraw.

The concept of “quiet quitting,” where a worker no longer goes above and beyond for the boss, started on TikTok and gained traction in the media. The worker does the work assigned, then closes the laptop and leaves at the end of the shift. Such workers do not judge themselves by professional productivity. They feel that they are reclaiming a healthy work-life balance and not letting their bosses take advantage of them.

All of us who started to work from home in the last couple years learned that we could accomplish projects on flexible schedules. We learned how to tune out distractions. More importantly, we began to like the work-life balance that remote work offered. For those of us who have been able to maintain a work from home or hybrid work schedule, we have continued to thrive. But others had to go back to the same situation as they had before the pandemic, and it has been frustrating.

In 2021, a Gallup survey revealed that 91 percent of remote workers said they hoped “their ability to work at home persists after the pandemic.” They liked the absence of a commute. Employers who have not embraced this may be suffering from less engagement from workers who are not so enthusiastic about losing their flexibility.

As related in a story by Sarah Jones in New York Magazine, Mayor Eric Adams of New York said that workers “can’t stay home in your pajamas all day. That’s not who we are as a city. You need to be out, cross-pollinating ideas, interacting with humans. It is crucial. We are social creatures, and we must socialize to get the energy we need as a city.” In an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, columnist Peggy Noonan wrote that there “is something demoralizing about all the empty offices, something post-greatness about them. There will be less knowledge of the workplace, of what’s going on, of the sense that you’re part of a burbling ecosystem.”

Mayor Adams and Ms. Noonan make total sense and we can agree with them while still preferring remote work.

Some workers did respond by to return to office by quitting. Others, faced with economic reality, but hating the experience, chose a different path. They went back to work but stopped hustling. They began to put less effort into tasks they did not enjoy, dreaming of what else they could be doing – on ‘company time’.  

Fortunately, there are solutions. But you need to empower your managers to stay ahead of the curve. They need to make sure their employees feel that they are doing meaningful work, give the employees some say in how and where things get done, listen to employees who feel burned out and work with them to solve the problems. Managers who focus on employee engagement will have a better chance to beat the quiet quitting phenomenon. They can create a work environment where everybody wins. It may be the biggest challenge of the year.