Quiet Quitting is a movement from the USA that is increasingly occupying the working world here as well. It means that employees do no more than what they are paid for. Is that healthy or just lazy? It depends on your perspective of gambling.
For many employees, regular overtime, after-hours calls and a multitude of extra projects are part of everyday working life. But does it have to be that way?
The concept of “Quiet Quitting” says: No. It thus represents a kind of counter-design to the prioritization of work, 60-hour weeks and permanent accessibility. Quiet Quitting seems to be the topic of the day, especially in the US labor market. What is meant by this is something very simple, something self-evident, one might think: Namely, that employees do no more for their companies than what they are employed and paid for.
Changing the World of Work
Especially since the beginning of the pandemic, many employees seem to be questioning their priorities. According to labor market experts, a slight shift is taking place: Mark Fallak, head of communications at the renowned Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), for example, believes “that in the career aspirations of the younger generation, the much-cited work-life balance is more important and tends to lean more toward life.” In other words, private freedom apparently counts more for many at work today than salary or prestige.
Fallak sees this as a reaction to increasing digitization in the working world – which, as we know, has accelerated the pandemic: “Digitization has made flexible, mobile working easier, which suits many people. On the other hand, however, this also leads to an increasing dissolution of boundaries between working hours and free time, which can have a very stressful effect if people do not succeed in setting limits for themselves,” says the expert.
It’s possible that the pandemic has also shown many people what really counts when the going gets tough: health and family, for example. If my job isn’t “systemically relevant” or I’m even being put on short-time work, why am I actually slaving away for it? In any case, the hype about “quiet quitting” reveals that quite a few people internationally are asking themselves whether the high workload that has become a matter of course in many jobs is still justified.
If you want, you can read a double meaning into the term “quiet quitting”: Quitting in the sense of “quitting,” that is, the “quiet quitting.” But “quit” can also mean as much as “give up” or “quit” – the giving up of “too much.”
Your value as a person is not defined by your performance. It is no longer clear who or what exactly the term goes back to, but it became a trend thanks to a viral TikTok video (around 3.5 million views), among other things, in which a user explains “Quiet Quitting”: it is not about quitting your job, but about saying goodbye to the idea of having to go above and beyond (“quitting the idea of going above and beyond”).
In the U.S. at least, “Quiet Quitting” is now perceived as a movement, with many, many people sharing about it on social media who no longer see why they should do more at work than what they’re paid to do.
