Against "Quiet Quitting"
RWL #295
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! And just like that, the slippers have returned. It was literally 90 degrees three weeks ago. I was sweating in my classroom as I did my first lectures of the semester. Last night it was in the 40’s and we lit the fire in our stove for the first time of the season. That is life in New England.
Quiet quitting has become a buzzy phrase in recent months. It implies that employees are withdrawing effort to a minimal level - in essence quitting - but still staying on the payroll and taking an employer’s money. There is a sense that this is justified because we have all been working so hard during the pandemic that we have lost a sense of work-life balance, and employers have been extracting more value from employees than they have been paying for, taking advantage of the fact that employees have been working from home and have felt obligated to work more hours without compensation because their laptops have been on their kitchen tables. Maybe this is true, maybe not. Certainly for some people it is true, but I suspect it was a small minority.
This week I have a WSJ article on this topic and HBS After Hours podcast addresses the concept as well. I wanted to offer some of my own thoughts here on the subject, and tie this idea into my ongoing discussion of a meaningful life.
A classic challenge of management is to get as much effort out of an employee as possible. In that sense, there is a tension between management and labor. We have always had some professions that had clear and measurable outputs. Piece work was common throughout history. For example merchants would give cloth to women who would sew in their homes, and then the merchant would pay them for the clothes they sewed (this was called a putting-out system). The output was obvious and measurable. In modern workplaces, measuring employee output is more difficult. Some professions, such as physicians, lawyers, and accountants, still have relatively measurable outputs. Lawyers and accountants have billable hours, most physicians have billable visits and/or procedures. But most of us have less measurable outputs because our work goes toward team output. How does one measure the output of the administrator for the department of cardiology at a hospital? One certainly wouldn’t want to pay based on things like numbers of memos written or emails sent (you get what you pay for, and no one wants more memos or emails). Most modern work is done in teams of some sort, or where individuals are part of a process where any one individual’s contributions are difficult to measure. But despite effort being difficult to quantify, effort is felt. This is what skilled managers are good at. They can tell when employees are positively impacting the workflow. Good managers reward good employees financially, but also with praise and greater long-term opportunity. (There are plenty of bad managers out there, and they don’t do this. But good managers do,and that’s the point.)
My concern with the phrase quiet quitting is it seems to be valorizing antisocial behavior. Agreeing to take money to do a job, and then not doing it, or doing it so minimally that you may as well not be, is simply theft. If you interviewed for a job, told the manager you wanted the job and you indicated you would put forth a reasonable level of effort, and then once hired, you did not, you would have misrepresented yourself and you would have committed a fraud against your employer. You would essentially be embezzling by taking a paycheck. If your life circumstances had changed and you no longer wanted to (or could) put the effort in, then you had an obligation to leave, to actually quit, not to quietly quit.
It is not just that quiet quitting is dishonorable, but it is harmful to the individual committing the offense in three ways. First, whenever we create a false justification to do something dishonorable and tell a story to ourselves that what we are doing is justified, we warp our sense of justice. We make ourselves smaller and meaner versions of what should be. As we weaken our own sense of honor, it is easier to commit the next violation and the next. The second way someone engaging in quiet quitting hurts themselves is people come to trust you less. You may feel clever, and even brag about how you are getting one over on “the Man”. But that is the problem - you are becoming a person who gets one over on other people. And people will trust you a little less, even if they sympathize with you. You sink a little in their esteem. The third way that quiet quitting hurts the quasi-quitter is they are engaged in a process of creating anti-meaning. I have been discussing how competence is one of the three components of life’s meaning. Quiet quitting is an active choice to embrace incompetence. As the WSJ article notes below, managers will notice that your work effort has diminished. It may take some time, and it may take a poor manager more time than an effective manager, but humans are hard wired to detect cheating, shirking, and free-riding. It is one of the reasons we have such big heads. You may not get fired immediately, but no one will look at you with respect and admiration if you are actively choosing to be incompetent. But most importantly, you will not look at yourself with respect. Trudging in to the office and then working hard to pretend you are working hard will leave you with less meaning because you will not be satisfying the need for genuine competence. Furthermore, you are not making a contribution, another of the three components of meaning. If you find your job so meaningless that you can bear the idea of neither being competent, nor do you think it has meaning to make a contribution, you should quit, not quietly quit. Life is too short. By engaging in quiet quitting, you actually reduce the sense of meaning in your life. You create anti-meaning.
As I’ve mentioned, I have friends who work in our Department of Recreation Management and Policy. They study the value of leisure and leisure activities. I tend to think of meaning as coming from work, but they have convinced me that meaning can also come from leisure. This doesn’t change my objection to quiet quitting, but I am willing to acquiesce to the idea that we can find all of the 3 C’s I have talked about in leisure as well as work. Nonetheless, work is an important opportunity to exercise the 3 C’s, regardless of whether your leisure life provides you greater sources of meaning. I came across an interesting article (ungated version here) last week that addressed the idea of career identity. It’s an older article, but I thought this passage was particularly interesting in light of my discussion of meaning.
Earlier in this article it was claimed that the increase in social and work-related insecurity forces (future) employees to answer two questions: “What does work mean in and for my life?” and “What do I want to mean to others through my work?” Developing a career identity can be seen as the formulation of an answer to those two questions which “address” the individual as a being that is capable of attributing meaning.
Meijers, F. The development of a career identity. International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling 20, 191–207 (1998). https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/A:1005399417256.pdf
I added the bold and italics to the quote. I liked these questions for reflection. How does work help us pursue meaning? Quiet quitting is the opposite of pursuing meaning. You might treat your job as instrumental, as a means for getting resources so you can pursue your leisure, which are the primary sources of meaning in your life, but if your work means less than nothing, you are hurting yourself every time you pretend to it.
So with that, willing good for all of you, I present you with the links!
Read
What: WSJ, If Your Quiet Quitting Is Going Well, You Might Be Getting ‘Quiet Fired’
Why: If you are embracing quiet quitting, maybe you aren’t ask clever as you think:
“If all of a sudden you find you’re not invited to the meetings you used to be, or being offered the projects, that’s an indication that management is not viewing you as well as they used to,” says Victor Assad, a former HR director
Like I said in the introduction, humans are hardwired to detect cheating and shirking. You might get away with it for a while, maybe even a long time, but it might be because your boss sees it as a hassle to deal with you because of the HR system. I tell my students all the time, you are always being observed and evaluated. If you have quietly quit, when someone in the organization asks about you, your boss is not bragging about you. She is not putting your name in for projects that could help you get ahead. When someone asks about your potential, she’s just shrugging her shoulders (at best). You are hurting yourself and your opportunity to get out of a job that does not provide you meaning.
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What: To listen well, get curious
Why: Some really good advice about how to listen. I was trained in active listening when I was an RA in college. The techniques have some validity, but it’s so obvious when you are using them that it can kind of backfire, as the article jokes about. But being curious - that is real listening. People want to be genuinely heard, not just listened to.
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Watch
What: Battlegrounds w/ H.R. McMaster, Civics Education (50 min)
Why: H.R. McMaster is a retired Army general who served as former President Trump’s National Security Advisor while on active duty. This is from his podcast/video interview series.
He discusses the importance of civics education with Professor Paul Carrese of Arizona State University as a corrective for our problems with polarization (my main topic for last week). It’s an interesting discussion. Understanding why our government is structured the way it is (because our Founders feared centralized power) is critical. Many of the things that appear as dysfunctions are actually features. Our system was designed to make change slow and difficult because dictators make change quick and easy - in favor of themselves. Worth a listen.
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Listen
What: After Hours, Quiet Quitting (33 min)
Why: The first segment is on quiet quitting, as I discussed in the introduction. I like how they talk about the difference between quiet quitting and disengagement. Mihir in particular has a similar attitude about quiet quitting as I do. It’s harmful not only to the organization, but the “quitter” as well.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso