In the modern workplace, you can "quiet quit" or stay and become a "resentee."
After a bad day at the office some workers reported "rage applying" on LinkedIn and coming up with a five-figure salary raise. Employers have also hit back with "quiet hiring" — spreading out the work between existing employees or freelancers instead of hiring a new full-time employee to save money.
DON'T MISS: Another Workplace Trend Is Making Employers Even Angrier
While 24-year-old engineer Zaid Khan's call about "quitting the idea of going above and beyond" at work went viral in 2022, this year is pushing some workers to be louder about their dissatisfaction — in its 2023 State of the Global Workplace report of 122,416 in 160 countries, polling company Gallup found that 18% of global workers are "loud quitting" or "actively disengaged" at work.
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'Loud Quitting' Can Be a Real Problem for Employers, Study Finds
"These employees take actions that directly harm the organization, undercutting its goals and opposing its leaders," write the survey's authors. "At some point along the way, the trust between employee and employer was severely broken."
The key difference between "quiet" and "loud" quitters is that the former are "filling a seat and watching the clock" while the latter are actively resentful and not bothering to hide it. This sometimes takes the form of complaining about the workplace to other employees, opposing instructions or, in the most extreme cases, actively sabotaging an employer's goals.
Gallup's numbers show that this behavior costs businesses over $8.8 trillion and 9% of global GDP but is often difficult to weed out in the early stages.
While 23% of the workers in the survey were found to be actively thriving at work, the majority (59%) are quiet quitters who can slide into "loud quitting" if employers do not help direct them into roles and a career trajectory that keeps them engaged.
"It has happened many times that I have addressed things, that staff members have addressed things," Andreas a 59-year-old leader of an IT team who admitted to sliding into loud quitting, told Gallup. "Then nothing changes."
Here's What to Do to Weed Out (And Help) Loud Quitters
When "quiet quitting" went viral in the summer of 2022, a very old debate about whether workers are just being "lazy" or employers are failing to motivate and compensate accordingly was reignited.
While the turn of the economy and the looming fear of layoffs makes "kicking back" a riskier strategy for workers who might have earlier felt more secure in their jobs, there is still a nationwide labor shortage that makes finding workers in many industries more difficult — while tech layoffs dominated the news headlines, the food and hospitality industries each lost over one million workers in 2023.
Employers who spot lack of engagement early have a chance to not only prevent bigger problems later on but also avoid having a revolving door of workers who either leave or are laid off only to need to keep finding talent when the economy turns or workload increases.
"Quiet quitters are often your greatest opportunity for growth and change," write the Gallup study's authors. "They are waiting for a leader or a manager to have a conversation with them, encourage them, inspire them. A few changes to how they are managed could turn them into productive team members."
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