Quiet Quitting, Workplace Mental Health, and Employer Choices
Vickie Choitz, Director of Trauma & Resilience at Work at the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce
The upcoming long Labor Day weekend is a good opportunity for us to reflect on why workers may be “quiet quitting,” workplace mental health considerations, and what employers can do differently to retain and engage talent. Quiet quitting is a new term for doing the minimum required work for a task or role at work. Reporters and opinion writers who first introduced the concept say it is a Millennial generation-driven phenomenon, but I’m seeing a version of quiet quitting in colleagues of all ages.
Quiet quitting is employees taking things into their own hands to manage two primary issues: managing job performance expectations and protecting their mental health. Employees are pushing back against uncompensated overtime by “acting their wage,” which means doing only the level or amount of work they feel they are paid for. They are responding to their lived experience in the workplace that working harder than what is required won’t get them further than working only as hard as is needed. In the revived discussion of equity in the last few years, it has become clear that hard work does not ensure success. For decades, we have believed the myth that the keys to upward mobility are working hard, putting in long hours, taking on extra tasks, and going “above and beyond” what is expected. In recent years, workers are seeing the truth behind this myth.
Additionally, employees are feeling the need to rebalance a work-life balance that has gotten completely out of whack. The unemployment and reemployment surges during the pandemic, working and schooling from home, and the stressful shuffling of work and workers in the Great Resignation are just a few of the work-life balance stressors many of us have had to deal with in recent years.
Quiet quitting also is a response to the collective trauma we all have experienced in the last two and a half years from the COVID-19 pandemic, resurging racial injustice, mass shootings, climate trauma, inflation, and war. Trauma does not go on pause when we clock in for work. It follows us to work and has a long tail. One set of symptoms from trauma includes becoming numb, disengaging, withdrawing from relationships, and feeling like nothing has meaning. These symptoms show up in quiet quitting for workers who don’t see the meaning in their work, who lack a healthy connection to work and co-workers, and who are disengaged.
As with any other trauma, the mental health drivers and symptoms of quiet quitting will not resolve themselves on their own. They may even fester and continue to undermine our relationship with work, which undermines the success of companies, organizations, and public agencies. It seems employers have a choice: they can continue with business as usual, trying to manage disengagement and quiet quitting. Or employers can take a different approach.
A first step in a new approach is to learn more about toxic stress and trauma — collective trauma, personal traumas, racial trauma — and how they can lead to employee disengagement. How does toxic stress and trauma — at work and outside of work — affect us as people, employees, supervisors, and employers? How are toxic stress and trauma affecting our work and our workplaces? And, what can employers do about it? Surprisingly there are dozens of specific actions we can take that don’t take any money, take just a little time, but do require intentionality and commitment. A few examples include:
• Rediscover and refocus on the meaning in our work. Have conversations with employees about what is meaningful to them and how that might relate to the work of the company or organization. This conversation can happen in a team meeting and/or one-on-one meetings with direct reports.
• Strengthen relationships and personal connections at work. Humans are neurologically wired to be social beings, meaning we need and thrive on relationships and interpersonal connections. Employers can help strengthen these relationships among work colleagues by doing simple things like starting each team meeting with an ice breaker in which employees share something about themselves, e.g., what was your first job, what would be your sport if you were an Olympic athlete, what is your favorite movie or musician? Other ways of strengthening personal connections among staff are to organize work by teams and encourage teamwork rather than doling out work, tasks, and performance expectations solely on an individual basis.
• Employers can cultivate work-life balance through workplace policies by implementing flexible work schedules, optional work-from-home days, mental health breaks and days, etc. Allow employees to work where and when they are most productive. To the extent possible in your industry, focus on the deliverables employees need to produce and less on dictating the process by which they produce them. Trusting your employees to do the work is reciprocal and will build employee trust in the company.
CSW and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions have written a knowledge-building guide on Trauma-Informed Approaches to Workforce: An Introductory Guide for Employers and Workforce Development Organizations. Start here to learn more about these essential topics. Also, CSW will be releasing a set of “quick guides” to help workforce development practitioners understand toxic stress, trauma, and resilience and practical steps to mitigate and manage trauma and build resilience. These tools are geared for workforce development folks but are applicable across sectors. Sign up for our newsletter to gain access to these tools when they come out this fall.
My insightful colleague, Sean Egan, Deputy Director of Labor at the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity has said, “employers may not want to address these sensitive issues, but, in reality, they are already having to address them in ways that are hurting the company bottom line in terms of increased use of sick days and health care costs, presenteeism, employee disengagement, burnout, and turnover.” We can add quiet quitting to that list. As you read about quiet quitting in articles and op eds this Labor Day weekend, I encourage you to think about the deeper “whys” behind this trend and what employers can be doing differently to encourage employees to reengage in our work, rediscover the meaning in it, recalibrate work-life balance, “right size” jobs and performance expectations, and cultivate mentally healthy workplaces.
