Quiet Quitting - the new “great resignation”

Edit rant removed

Just applying a trendy title to something that has gone on since time immemorial. RTE just copied and pasted what was in the Irish Times during the week. There were always people who did the minimum necessary in a job and people who after a number of years in a job started freewheeling.

Hmm I just went on a rant in my responses. I think it was the 9-5 mention from RTE, of all organisations, when that's a short work week for me.

But yep, what you said nails it for a lot of cases.

There's a thin line between being flexible and covering for headcount gaps/unwillingness to hire.

I've no problem with an extra half hour or so here and there, or staying late to help with something like an outage, but if it became a regular or expected thing that would be a very different story.

Quiet Quitting? Is that what they're calling the admin side of the HSE now?

I’m in business a long time and have noticed a change coming pre pandemic, but it’s definitely sped up.

I think post recession people realised that no matter how hard they worked, their employer would let them go if there was a downturn again. Among younger people there was a bit of naïveté, unpaid overtime became quite common in some sectors, and people nearly looked down on those with better working conditions. For example it was v common to slag off the superior working conditions in the public sector, when the smart move was to join it.

Anyway, a few hundred thousand people lost their jobs in the recession and attitudes changed a bit. The hard truth began to be understood, employers, myself included, can’t and don’t reward loyalty or hard work to the extent it’s deserved.

People had definitely become a bit more sensible about how they worked pre pandemic, but it’s at another level now. Very hard get or keep staff and motivation isn’t a fraction of what it was in the Celtic Tiger years, or even three years ago.

While it doesn’t suit me, the reality is people have just copped on, they’re not going to put in more effort that what they are payed for. It’s 100% fair, but it’s a challenge for business, the culture is no longer as pro business. It’s more like what it was in the 70s and 80s than the early 2000s.

It’s playing out politically too, SF have more support than FF or FG.

Biting your nose to spite your face.

You might not want to put in the extra effort and that's fair enough.

When the promotions and pay raises are being dished out, you'll be at the back of the queue.

When you're in your 20s and early 30s, free of baggage and have the energy, that's the time to work your ass off and make a name for yourself.

Quiet quitting is a nonsense term.

It is people working the hours they are meant to. Rightly so. There is more to life do your job, work hard when you are meant to (zero time personally for people who sit and literally watch the clock - but that is a different thing) and switch off when you are meant to be off. Pretty simple. Obviously if there is an occasional out of hours issue or an emergency I would happily help out even at weekends.

People working huge amounts of overtime is not a sign of hard work necessarily,if anything I think we should be aiming for a 4 day week.

I think you’ve both misconstrued the group of people being identified in the latest social media fad. They’re not the people who work hard or the people you know you can trust, or that team you put together that you know you have each other’s backs on a project, you know what’s going on because your team are comfortable with coming to you with anything and you’re able to plan accordingly. Just now I think of it, as I said in another thread yesterday - when they ask me to add them on Facebook, I know more than I want to know about them already. I know I can trust them, I don’t need to know anything else about them.

The types who are literally looking for praise for doing the most basic expectations of their employment, I wouldn’t want to deal with them in the first place. I don’t know how, or why they’re employed, but they’re clearly lacking in job satisfaction, it’s unrewarding for them, because they’re looking to be rewarded for achieving nothing. They always have a “sticking it to the man, company doesn’t care about you” mentality, whereas 99% in my experience, just don’t care about themselves.

They’re not the same as someone who is efficient, productive and capable of managing their time effectively so that I know I can rely on them, I don’t have to micro-manage them to the nth degree, wasting my own time that’s better spent on work projects I’m working on. It sounds like those employees engaging in this latest fad just want people to notice them, they want to be supervised and micro-managed so they can justify their bad attitude to the world of employment as an adult, where they are expected to be able to be trusted to manage themselves.

IMHO - employers have been taking the piss. Expectations of always on and blind loyalty. I don’t think the answer is downing tools at 5pm but neither is it acceptable that people work too 9pm and still have to catch up at the weekend with the implicit threat of no promotions or bonuses.