A ‘quiet’ place?

With Halloween fast approaching, I thought I’d regale you with a spooky tale of the corporate world’s favorite new boogeyman: quiet quitting.

Like many scary things for people over age 45, this story begins on TikTok and Reddit, where this summer Gen Z and millennial workers were riffing about “quiet quitting” — generally defined as doing the minimum amount of work required of them and not going above and beyond.

This in turn kicked off a panicked wave of stories and podcasts from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Fortune, decrying anti-hustle culture as the End of Western Civilization as We Know It, with spine-tingling, bone-chilling headlines like, “Why Half The Workforce Is Quiet Quitting, And What To Do About It.”

Since then, like a monster in the third act of a creature feature, the clickbait stories about quiet quitting will not die — even though the phenomenon may turn out to be about as real as Dracula or the Wolf Man.

The most hyperbolic stories are those that would lead one to conclude that half the U.S. workforce are total slackers.

The one stat trumpeted most in quiet-quitting stories is a June Gallup poll of U.S. employee engagement. Gallup warned of a “quiet quitting crisis,” noting that quiet quitters “make up 50% of the U.S. workforce” — and “probably more,” Gallup added for pulse-quickening good measure.

Here’s the thing, though: The June survey of nearly 15,100 full- and part-time workers found that 32% are engaged at their jobs and 18% are “actively disengaged” (read “one foot out the door”). Gallup labeled the remaining middle 50% as “quiet quitters,” saying these are “people who do the minimum required and are psychologically detached from their job.”

But Gallup’s been conducting this same poll for at least 22 years and while it measured four-point increases in people who say they’re actively engaged or disengaged in their jobs since 2020, the folks they’re calling “quiet quitters” have hovered between 50% to 55% of the workforce for decades, so there’s not anything necessarily new going on here.

In other words, these are people, who like many millennials and Gen Zers, don’t define themselves by the work they do. They show up, do what they’re asked, get paid and go home. No more, no less.

The term “quiet quitting” apparently was coined by 44-year-old Gen X career coach Bryan Creely, who posted a TikTok video with his thoughts on a March article from Insider devoted to “coasting culture.” Insider writer Aki Ito wrote about how exhausted, overtaxed workers had “quietly decided to take it easy at work rather than quit their jobs.”

Several of the mainstream stories about quiet quitting focus on remote work or white-collar jobs, but many viral videos and posts about quiet quitting were created by lower-paid hourly workers who say they’re being asked to take on more and more work for no extra compensation. “Act your wage” is a common saying among these folks, and it’s notable that this comes at a time when CEO-to-worker pay ratios are at an all-time high, with the average S&P CEO in 2021 making 324 times more than their workers’ median pay. Amazon.com Inc. tops the list, with a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 6,474 to 1. (For more on this, see our October 2022 cover story about executive compensation.)

Amid pandemic-sparked labor shortages, everyone from hourly restaurant workers to office desk jockeys to remote executives was asked to take on more duties, with work increasingly encroaching on personal and family time in ways both subtle and substantive.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that what many overextended “quiet quitters” are actually talking about in their posts and videos is the need for work-life balance — that they’re literally tired of living to work, rather than the other way ’round.

There’s a reason the phrases most likely to repel job seekers these days include “must handle stress well,” “willing to wear many hats” and “responsibilities may include those outside the job description,” according to the results of a survey of 800 U.S. adults released in September by Paychex Inc., a payroll processing company.

For many, “quiet quitting” seems to be just another way of saying they’re setting work-life boundaries.

But it does make for scary headlines.