Quiet Quitting? Minimum Monday? What to take seriously and what to ignore at work – 04/25/2023 – Market

There was a time when nobody talked about quiet quitting, Sunday terrors, Little Monday and all the other jargon – or “buzzwords” – that plagued the way people talk about work.

I remember that time well because it was only three years ago. These new catchphrases describe a shift in how we view our jobs that has reportedly been triggered by Covid.

Researchers reported last year that 65% of global employees said the pandemic has made them rethink the place work should occupy in their lives. Employers were advised to recognize that their employees wanted “purposeful work” and a sense of being valued, not just a paycheck.

There is clearly some truth to this, even after the recent spate of mass layoffs and economic gloom. But do bosses really need to take every new workplace lingo seriously? Can’t most of these terms safely be dismissed as attractive chatter from social media and TikTok-savvy twenty-somethings?

I always thought so. But last week I chatted with Anthony Klotz, the American academic who coined the greatest buzzword of all – the Great Renunciation. He convinced me that the data paints a more nuanced picture.

The Great Renunciation itself was, of course, very real. Firing rates rose gradually before Covid, but in 2022 more than 50 million American workers left their jobs, the highest annual number in more than 20 years, and other countries saw similar jumps.

Klotz, who resigned and moved from the US to University College London’s business school last year, predicted the trend before official numbers confirmed it.

The number of dropouts has decreased. As Klotz says, the vast majority of them never left the workforce altogether, but moved into similar jobs and now remain where they are. In addition, employers have begun to offer better-paying work with more flexibility and better benefits, and the economy has deteriorated, so job switching is less attractive.

But what about the idea related to quiet quitting, a term that grew out of a TikTok post last year about doing your job and nothing else, and generally putting life ahead of work. Is it remotely real?

Experts have largely dismissed the phrase as just another term for employee disengagement. But Klotz says that a disengaged employee is someone who starts doing a bad job or falling back on all their tasks, which is not what silent quitters mean. “They’re talking about switching off the extra, not going beyond the definition of the job, which is different,” he says.

This has implications for both employers and employees. Klotz’s research has shown that while going above and beyond the call of duty can be rewarding, it can also be draining.

“Application of rage” is another phrase that emerged from a post on TikTok, but it shouldn’t be entirely dismissed by employers. It means applying en masse for jobs after getting bored of the job.

This “spray-and-pray” job search strategy is not new, and it describes a type of retaliatory employee behavior that has been studied for years.

But the proliferation of online work platforms makes it much easier to get things done, and some workers may be more sensitive to the office oversights and frustrations they avoided while working remotely.

So Klotz advises employers to maintain a fair workplace — and ensure your organization is listed on every platform that rival company anger enforcers might be using.

So what terms are bosses most likely to overlook?

First: “resenteeism,” the supposedly evil twin of silent desistance. It means staying in a job you hate because you have no choice and starting to actively resent it, which, as Klotz puts it, is “classic disengagement.”

He says there’s also no empirical evidence showing an increase in so-called Sunday terrors, or dreads of the approaching workweek, nor “Minimum Mondays,” another TikTok hit, coined by a young woman who described how to deal with these fears.

“It’s not something that’s happening, it’s something that’s being recommended,” says Klotz. He doesn’t think employers need to dwell on it, except to ask if there’s any evidence that their workers come in on Mondays looking frazzled and far from replenished.

The conclusion? It makes sense to keep an eye on all these developments. Some are supported by evidence. But never forget that being a trend online doesn’t mean being a trend in life.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves