There’s one workplace trend that is just refusing to go away. “Quiet quitting” originally came to prominence around 2022 when the Collins Dictionary released its shortlist for its annual word of the year.
The shortlist for included terms like “Partygate” and “vibe shift” but was eventually won by “permacrisis”, a portmanteau that means an extended period of instability and insecurity. However there was another phrase on that shortlist that’s now entered the vocabulary of workers around the world: “quiet quitting”.
It’s a strange term however, as it doesn’t really refer to quitting your job, but instead to deciding that you’re only going to do the bare minimum requirements of it as a way of expressing how you feel about work.
Since 2022, the phrase has well and truly taken hold, sometimes also referred to as “acting your wage” or “calibrated contributing”. But little did we realise that 2022 was just the start, as recent Google Trends data has shown that interest in the term has not slowed down, with searched for it tripling in the last twelve months alone. So now that we know this trend is not going anywhere, how can we tackle it once and for all?
‘Quiet quitting’ does not exist in a vacuum, and is part of a wider trend of workers expressing discontent in indirect ways. Instead of outright quitting, or actively communicating with managers, some employees are preferring to be more subtle with their protests as intentional acts.
There are two ways to tackle this growing epidemic, and the first is to simply acknowledge its existence and power. This discontent with work has been rising for years, as seen in the increase in popularity of people wanting to talk about it. On Reddit alone, one forum called ‘antiwork’ ballooned from 13,000 members in 2019 to over 2.7 million people two years later. Instead of just being a place for people to rant about how to not work, it became a focal point for a movement of people to discuss how to leave their jobs or their growing discontent with work in general.
Many workers are feeling overworked and exhausted by the constant churn of work, and sometimes the easiest thing for them to do is nothing at all. This has led to small acts of rebellion in the workplace instead of large gestures. For example, a recent trend that gained popularity in 2024 was ‘coffee badging’. This is where people who usually work from home come temporarily into the office only to go out for coffee after swiping their work badges so the system knows they are present. One report by Owl Labs shows around half of respondents said they had done this. This discontent is real, it’s here and it’s not going away.
The main way to address it is to confront it head on, by encouraging open, honest and transparent conversations at all levels of a business. You need to understand what the core motivations are behind it, which differ from each individual worker and business. Some of them could include things like lack of adequate renumeration, ill-fitting policies, organisational misalignments, technology apprehension or overworked employees. Organisations need to diagnose the problem first, which can be done through confidential surveys or staff check-ins that prioritise transparency over politeness.
Once you’ve identified the core issues, you should aim to co-create a solution together that takes into account the needs of the employee and the employers. The biggest problems occur when there’s too much tension in this relationship which manifests itself in workers wanting to be heard by doing things like ‘quiet quitting’ or ‘coffee badging’.
This epidemic is not going away anytime soon, and is reflective of large megatrends in the workplace. So instead of hoping that it does, take the time to try to get to the root cause of it and address is from the inside out. That is the only way we’re going to get to the other side.
