I hesitate to write about “quiet quitting” because, in a matter of weeks, the phrase has cruised well into overexposure territory. But I feel almost compelled to share that it’s possible for employees to sustain a happy medium between burnout-induced slacking and the live-to-work drive that is ingrained as part of Corporate America.

To quickly summarize, quiet quitting as a concept started when some employers and managers noticed that workers had extensive personal or professional priorities outside of work and weren’t exceeding expectations with their actual workload.

The terminology doesn’t make sense to me as the phenomenon is neither “quiet” nor “quitting.” It isn’t “quiet” because workers aren’t being sneaky about these other priorities. And it isn’t “quitting” because workers are still showing up to work and meeting expectations, even if their performances aren’t always blowing managers away.

According to 2021 statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a U.S. employee works an average of 1,791 hours a year. This is 442 more hours than the average worker in Germany, 294 more than the worker in the U.K. and 184 more than the worker in Japan. And while the government has reported that U.S. labor productivity has declined this year, there could be many reasons for this—such as Covid-19-related absences and team shake-ups due to resignations.

I asked a few leaders what they thought of all this, starting with Laura Baldwin, the president of O’Reilly Media Inc., a provider of online and virtual training in technology and business.

“Quiet quitting is more about an employee setting boundaries than trying to coast by with little to no effort,” Ms. Baldwin said. Employees are taking more control of a financial system that has long rewarded company growth at all costs, she said, and it’s a continuation of workers speaking up for themselves and setting boundaries that began during the pandemic.

Piyush Mehta, the chief human resources officer of Genpact, a professional services firm with 100,000 employees in more than 30 countries, believes that quiet quitting is simply a way individuals renegotiate their own sense of balance.

“I can see how it’s raising people’s awareness about how they feel about their work and perhaps prodding them to ask themselves if their jobs are fulfilling or not,” Mr. Mehta said. “And if that leads to employees taking steps to evolve their roles within their current organization or update their skills, I see that as a good thing.”

While the quiet-quitting trend is nothing to be alarmed about, here are three things leaders can do to ensure the most effective employee support:

• Temper expectations. As Ms. Baldwin said, it isn’t 100% on the employee to manage the tension between their personal priorities and the culture of workaholism. Leaders need to take responsibility for matching organizational culture to the realities of today’s world, and understand that employees no longer want to work around the clock. And, an employee may not have your track record of smashing every key performance indicator that comes their way, and that has to be OK.
• Respect that learning needs to happen on company time. It’s one thing to give employees learning and development opportunities, but it’s another to work people so hard they don’t have the energy to take advantage of those opportunities. “Your people need to have the space and time to invest in building new skills,” Ms. Baldwin said.
• Be on the lookout for actual disengagement and burnout. Sometimes quiet quitting means assertive balance, and at other times it could be a sign of underlying issues. A company can solve for an employee’s active disengagement and resentment with a personalized, engaging and responsive employee experience, including real-time employee sentiment checks and behavioral-health support tools.

For instance, Genpact’s digital chatbot, Amber, reaches out to employees to capture their immediate concerns and make empathic suggestions for managing their work/life balance. Genpact is seeing an impressive two-times attrition difference between employees who engage with Amber chats versus those who don’t.

While the broadly defined “quiet quitting” trend may not be a problem in and of itself, increasing employee disengagement, a measure of involvement in the workplace and enthusiasm about work, certainly is. And according to Gallup’s 2022 survey of more than 15,000 U.S. workers, the situation has especially only gotten more dire for younger workers.

In 2022, employee engagement continued a decline that started in 2021, with the proportion of engaged workers remaining at 32% but the proportion of actively disengaged workers increasing to 18%. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is now 1.8 to 1, the lowest in almost a decade.

Gallup described the actively disengaged as “loud quitters,” or employees who tend to have most of their workplace needs unmet and spread their dissatisfaction via TikTok posts with millions of views and comments. Most are already looking for another job.

Notably, Gallup also found a decline in engagement and employer satisfaction among remote Gen Z and younger millennials—or those below 35 years of age. The percentage of engaged employees under 35 years dropped by six percentage points from 2019 to 2022. And during the same time, the percentage of actively disengaged younger employees increased by six points.

The Gallup survey said that since the pandemic, younger workers cited lack of feeling cared about and having opportunities to develop—primarily from their manager—as key reasons for their disengagement. The degree to which these feelings hurt their engagement levels shows just how much employee experience and manager relationships truly matter.

Access the full report.

As prices of food and essentials continue to rise, more people are asking for increased pay across several industries. And, labor unions continue to broaden their base.

Here's what happened last week:

• Data showed that the total size of the U.S. labor force reached 164.7 million people in August, exceeding the February 2020 prepandemic level for the first time. The labor force would have 500,000 more members if not for the people sickened by Covid-19, according to a new study.
   
• Freight railroads are yet to reach labor deals with two large unions representing 66,000 workers and face a Friday deadline to do so. Both groups voted to authorize a strike if a deal isn’t reached.
   
• Amazon said it is planning to invest $450 million to fund pay raises and benefits for its delivery partners, as the e-commerce giant gears up for the peak holiday season amid a persistently tight labor market.
   
• Separately, a union election at an Amazon facility in upstate New York has been scheduled for October, setting up another company showdown with activist workers trying to build on a watershed union victory earlier this year.
   
• Weyerhaeuser Union Members Strike in Oregon and Washington
• Minnesota Nurses Go on Strike Over Retention, Staffing, Pay
• Members of New York Times, NBC News Digital Unions Defy Return-to-Office Plans

We hear from several workers and a CEO who are dealing with these issues in their workplaces. Then, management professor Kristie Rogers tells us what bosses and managers need to do to make all their workers feel valued. Listen here.

• ‘Work Hard, Play Hard’ and More Phrases That Can Scare Away Job Applicants (WSJ)
   
• Quiet Quitting: A Loud Trend Taking Over Social Media (NPR)
   
• Quiet Quitting: New Term for an Old Problem in a Changed Workplace (Society for Human Resource Management)
   
• ‘Quiet Quitting’ Threat Elevates Significance of Middle Managers (Axios)
   
• The 3 Nonnegotiable Attributes All Employees Want From Their Workplaces (HR Dive)
   
• Google’s ‘Quiet Hiring’ Method Is Excellent for Employers, but Dangerous for Employees Who ‘Quiet Quit’ (Entrepreneur)

Alexandra Levit is a business and workplace author and speaker. Chitra Vemuri curated this newsletter.

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