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The viral trend of the summer, “quiet quitting” has been anything but quiet — and some would argue that it’s not even a trend. What started as a 17-second TikTok meditation on hustle culture has quickly become the latest battlefront between employees and their bosses.

Some say quiet quitting is a response from pandemic-worn workers fending off burnout; others dismiss it as a Gen Z buzzword for the age-old practice of slacking off on the job. Media mogul Ariana Huffington went so far as to call it “a step toward quitting on life,” while the Boston Globe hailed it as the beginning of a quiet revolution that could expand to quiet cooking, quiet parenting, and quiet laundry.

The term itself is fraught with imprecision. Quiet quitting doesn’t actually involve quitting. Instead it describes what some call “acting your wage,” that is, doing precisely what your job requires of you. Full stop. 

“All jobs have core elements, which we call in-role performance . . . quiet quitting is quitting everything beyond that,” says Anthony Klotz, a management professor at University College London and the person who coined the term “great resignation.”  

Anthony doesn’t see quiet quitting as inherently good or bad. He thinks that workers who go above or beyond the call of duty — those who exhibit what he calls “citizenship behaviors” — tend to do so when they think the organization has rightly invested in them. The ones who feel that they’ve been left out to dry, he says, are bound to do the bare minimum.

Bonnie Dilber, a recruiting manager with Zapier, goes a step further. In a recent LinkedIn post she admonished companies for what she terms “quiet firing.” “This happens ALL THE TIME,” she wrote, listing some common symptoms: “You don’t receive feedback or praise”; “You get raises of 3% or less while others are getting much more”; and “You’re not kept up to date on information that is relevant or critical to your work.” 

When this happens, Bonnie says employees are made to feel underappreciated and will eventually leave to find another job. Or worse, their performance will dip so badly that they’ll be terminated.

In a recent column for the Washington Post, writer Karla L. Miller posits that the quiet quitting/quiet firing phenomenon may be a byproduct of the work-from-anywhere model. With remote employees moving further away from their jobs and employers reducing office spaces, she says, “it’s starting to look like they’re daring one another to end the work relationship.” 

Veteran recruiter Adam Karpiak proposes an idea: “Instead of complaining about ‘quiet quitting’ companies should focus on ‘loud retaining,’” he wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. Organizations, he suggested, should put more effort into making employees feel valued rather than merely tolerated.

Embedded in that notion is the basic concept of fairness: Workers should be compensated accordingly for the job they do, extra mile and all. Robert Lloyd-Charles, a senior learning and performance support analyst/officer at U.S. Bank, offered to rebrand the trend as “100 Percenting.” “Quiet quitters are giving 100%,” he wrote. “They are doing their jobs. . . . [T]hey are demanding to be paid 150% percent of their wages when they’re asked to do 150% of the work. That’s not laziness. That’s math.”

Indeed many in the TA community are uncomfortable with the framing of quiet quitting. Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify, an HR services company, said in a LinkedIn post, “I’m very heartened by the volume of HR practitioners in my network calling bs on the term.”

Despite an uptick in employee disengagement, Lars thinks that calibrating your professional commitments and capacities in order to protect your well-being is a natural function of what it is to be an employee in 2022 — or any year, really. (As Adam wryly phrased it in a LinkedIn post last month, “it’s only quiet quitting if it comes from the Champagne region of France otherwise it’s just sparkling boundaries.”)

In fact, once you scratch away the layers, it can start to feel like quiet quitting is just noisy social media shorthand for a more universal human condition: work.

“We’re desperate to try to find some unique rationale for these very normal employee sentiments and actions,” says Tricia Mansfield, the chief talent officer at Porter Novelli. “It will always be as simple as ‘take care of your employees’ (however you may define it) and they will take care of your clients.”

Andrew Gadomski, the founder of Aspen Analytics, adds: “We have bigger problems to handle in HR beyond current employees that meet performance, claim decent personal boundaries, and stay.”

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