Quiet quitting is a term for employee disengagement, where workers do the bare minimum at their job and stop engaging in extra activities. It is a phenomenon that has been linked to burnout, chronic workplace stress, and dissatisfaction with work culture.
The term itself, like the practice, emerged in the wake of the Covid pandemic that forced radical changes in lifestyle and workplace practices and attitudes.
According to Psychology Today, quiet quitters continue to fulfill their primary responsibilities, but they’re less willing to engage in activities known in the business world as citizenship behaviors—working late, showing up early, or attending non-mandatory meetings.
The movement has had both a positive and negative impact on professionals’ mental well-being. It turns out however, that it is not only employees who are distancing themselves from the office. Employers are quiet quitting in their own way: they’re leaving behind the whole idea of traditional full-time employment.
In a survey conducted by the Atlanta Fed last year, businesses said remote work had led them to stock up on part-time employees, temps, independent contractors, and outsourced positions both at home and abroad. If workers are going to be remote, the thinking seems to go, why not get the cheapest remote workers available? Fewer full-time jobs mean fewer costly benefits: healthcare, pensions, on-the-job training, a steady paycheck. In the age of WFH (working from home), companies are turning jobs into “gigs”.
“It’s the Uberization of the workforce,” says Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford University who was one of the economists behind the Atlanta Fed survey. “The more remote you are, the more Uberized the job is, and the more you’re just being paid for the day or for the week.”
For companies, offering full-time employment has always been expensive and risky. But there was one reason bosses were reluctant to outsource jobs: They didn’t trust that people would do their work if they weren’t under constant supervision in the office, checking that people were at their desks, typing away and making calls and generally, looking purposeful and engaged. That ruled out contractors, because contractors work remotely. And it ruled out many part-timers, because no one wanted to commute 45 minutes into an office just to work a four-hour day.
The pandemic changed all that, bosses were astonished to discover that their teams were perfectly capable of doing their jobs from home. They learned to supervise their workers by checking their output, not their hours logged at a desk. That, in turn, made them more comfortable with the idea of hiring far-flung contractors, or part-timers who could put in a few hours a day from home. And in a remote environment, even full-time employees started to feel more distant. The pretense that they were “family,” was largely abandoned.
“If somebody’s coming into your site five days a week, week in, week out, it feels like they’re your employee,” says Bloom. “You want to give them healthcare, a pension, train them up, have them as a long-term part of the firm. But as soon as they’re not on site, managers think it’s not so obvious they want to pay all those additional costs. Employees aren’t mixing, they aren’t talking over lunch about kids. They may be less loyal to the company. I do hear this from companies — the more remote someone is, the more transactional it feels.”
For some, the gig-afication of full-time jobs may be a good thing: digital nomads don’t want to be tied down by a single job. Sixty-somethings want to work a lighter schedule as they near retirement. New parents are resisting corporate America’s return-to-office dictates. Others may be forced into accepting the changes because they have no choice. Millions of workers could find themselves without the job security and benefits that traditionally come only with a W-2 form and healthcare benefits.
Is there a solution? “We need to think about how we give people access to social supports that used to be solely provided through an employer,” says Liz Wilke, a principal economist at Gusto. “What is the middle path that maintains all of the benefits this set of workers brings to the workforce — flexibility, agility, really strong incentives for consistent and regular upskilling — while still providing them the kinds of social support we think people who work should have? That conversation should happen, especially if this trend continues — which I think, based on our data, it will.”
