After the "Great Resignation," businesses in America and Europe need to be concerned with another post-pandemic phenomenon: "quiet quitting."
Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at University College London, first used the phrase "great resignation" in May 2021 when he projected that American workers would quit their employment due to exhaustion and the freedom of working from home. On the other hand, the expression "quiet quitting" can be a little deceptive. Noise is not a factor in it. Additionally, it doesn't actually need you to leave your job. Quiet leaving means that you do not overwork yourself or perform additional tasks for which you will not be paid; you are neither an underachiever nor an overachiever. Doing the tasks associated with your designated function, nothing more and nothing less. To put it simply, it's carrying out your duties without letting your job rule your entire life. The quiet resigning movement is occurring at a time when work-life imbalances, hustling culture, and exploitative labor practices have reached a breaking point, all of which have led to high rates of employee burnout.
According to Maria Kordowicz, director of the University of Nottingham's center for inter-professional education and learning and associate professor of organizational behavior, the rise in silent resignations is associated with a discernible decline in work satisfaction. Only 9% of UK employees, who ranked 33rd out of 38 European nations in Gallup's global workplace survey for 2022, were engaged or passionate about their work. In the autumn of 2021, a poll of NHS employees revealed that morale had decreased from 6.1 to 5.8 out of 10 and that staff engagement had decreased from 7.0 to 6.8. The literature generally, across the professions, would say that, indeed, people's manner of responding to their work has altered, Kordowicz said.
"Since the pandemic, people's relationship with work has been investigated in numerous ways,” she added. "The desire for purpose has become significantly more evident," continued Kordowicz. During the pandemic, there was a feeling of impending death, and individuals were asking themselves, "What should work mean for me? How can I carry out a role that is more consistent with my values? This, in my opinion, is related to the aspects of quiet resigning that may be more detrimental: mentally disengaging from a job, being worn out by the amount of work, and the lack of work-life balance that many of us experienced during the pandemic.
