Quiet quitting — described through examples like employees’ shrinking expectations of work, working only enough to handle what’s on their plate instead of pursuing career goals, and losing the motivation to succeed in the workplace — could, if it spreads as a new model of working, end up causing losses in the long run for both employer and employee. Research suggests it has so far surfaced in a narrow slice of the workforce, but the picture is still serious enough to argue that companies should not look the other way…
How Does Quiet Quitting Affect Work Life Over the Long Term?
Continuing as a “quiet quitter” — having broken the emotional bond with company and unit managers — can, when interpreted as setting boundaries between work and private life and as the employee’s own attempt at justice on the scale of effort, time and value, be seen from the employee’s side as an understandable stance, a kind of silent reaction.
When employee satisfaction isn’t taken seriously enough for the sake of productivity, or when open communication and a culture of mutual feedback hasn’t developed inside the company, the employee may move into quiet quitting — sometimes without even realising it — just to keep their working life going.
So how does quiet quitting affect work life over the long term? While the world is starting to debate ideas like the four-day work week, what should companies’ perspective on quiet quitting be, and how should they approach an employee who is in it?
What Is Quiet Quitting Trying to Show Work Life?
The themes quiet quitting brings to the agenda — the employee’s self-worth, work–life balance, open communication in working life — also look like an opportunity that companies can use to adapt to a new era and broaden their vision. The big companies that adopt this approach in HR are preparing to lead the new trends in working life.
For that reason, instead of ignoring quiet quitting or looking for temporary fixes, it should be treated as an opportunity: a chance to put important items that need restructuring in working life on the table and to make the necessary changes. Because with all of its positive and negative outputs, quiet quitting seems to signal that some things in working life now need to be updated.
What Is Quiet Quitting?
Quiet quitting is the working state in which an employee, while unhappy with their working conditions, keeps coming in and going home, doing only the work covered by their job description and work plan, meeting their tasks on time, but avoiding any extra responsibility and refusing to spend extra time for the job.
A quiet quitter doesn’t actually resign — but, in order to keep working life sustainable, applies certain boundaries in their relationship with company, brand, job, workplace, managers or boss.
They don’t make extra effort to do the job better. They’ve given up using their energy on the job without limit. They’ve lost the motivation to push their career forward or aim for promotion.
While it can look like a form of passive resistance or a silent reaction to bad working conditions, quiet quitting is seen as something deeper — a kind of “disconnection from the system”.
Because young white-collar workers and the Z generation, having started rethinking the meaning of life and work after the pandemic, discovered something important: society defines people by the success they’ve achieved in work, the position they hold and the money they earn — and assigns value accordingly. But what really determines a person’s value? And to what extent does the success they’ve achieved at work, their profession or what they do, define them?
The Origin of the “Quiet Quitting” Concept
The “quiet quitting” video by 24-year-old software engineer Zaid Khan, which went viral on TikTok, struck a chord with a new generation of workers searching for answers to these very questions — amplified by the chance to “rethink” that the COVID-19 pandemic had created.
What did the young, talented Khan say? “Quiet quitting doesn’t mean leaving your job — it just means refusing to let work take over your life. Your job is not your life. Your value is not defined by what you produce.” With this single proposition, the meaning of work and the entrenched value judgements around it were put up for debate, especially for younger workers.
Quiet Quitting Is More Common Among Talented Young Employees!
Hiring criteria for qualified-talent employment are built around the candidate’s vision, level of education and culture. Because working with agile, multi-skilled, team-oriented, energetic, positive, responsible people who can use initiative is what most contributes to a company’s growth and success.
When this employee profile isn’t recognised by company and managers the way it should be, or when they’re not satisfied materially and emotionally, the worry of not finding another job pushes them not toward formal resignation but toward quiet quitting.
Reading correctly this defence mechanism — developed by employees whose talents are often ignored and who are constantly pushed into sacrifice — is seen as the way to convince qualified staff to stay and step out of quiet quitting.
When companies stay in open communication with their quiet-quitter employees and try to understand the process, they don’t just solve the problem — they strengthen the company structure and seriously contribute to rebuilding the bond with the employee, this time much more strongly.
At this point, correctly identifying the reasons that push the employee into quiet quitting is the first and most important step.
The Reasons That Push Employees into Quiet Quitting
The relationship societies build with working life — shaped by their socioeconomic problems or priorities, cultural values and generational gaps — varies from country to country. In other words, the leading reasons that push an employee into quiet quitting differ in every geography.
In high-welfare countries, quiet quitting emerges as a result of questioning the meaning and value of life, driven more by emotional deprivation around working hours and the mental and emotional energy poured into work. In countries with weaker economies, where employees are forced to keep working under any condition, the most prevalent reason for quiet quitting is economic dissatisfaction.
Aside from a series of events that have significantly changed working life in a very short time — companies’ working conditions, the shifting cultural fabric and value sets, the entry of the Z generation into the workforce, working from home during COVID-19, digitalization — the other reasons pushing employees into quiet quitting, in short bullets:
- Long hours, never-ending overtime, and the always-on mindset trigger quiet quitting.
- When the boundary between work life and private life blurs, the employee moves into quiet quitting.
- Burnout syndrome in working life pushes the employee into quiet quitting as a defence mechanism.
- Employees whose successes and sacrifices for the company are ignored keep going in quiet-quit mode after a while.
- Employees who feel the company, manager or boss doesn’t care about them and doesn’t value them shift into quiet quitting.
- Qualified, dedicated employees who think they can’t take their career further where they are work through the disappointment of unmet expectations by retreating into quiet quitting and trying to sustain working life that way.
- Employees who aren’t materially satisfied and don’t feel they get the return on their effort go into quiet quitting and stick to fulfilling only their defined duties instead of giving more for the company.
How Does Quiet Quitting Harm Companies?
An employee in quiet-quit mode does what’s on their plate, meets their duties, but doesn’t want to do more. For companies that aren’t in a growth phase or don’t have a growth target, quiet quitting may not look that bad — because these employees aren’t disrupting work and therefore don’t seem to harm the company.
But employees in quiet-quit mode — who don’t want to be part of carrying the work forward, raising potential, or contributing to the emotional investments that strengthen relationships between employees and the bond between employee and company — have, in the long run, effectively resigned from the category of “employees who add value to the company”, whether materially or emotionally.
When the employee’s emotional ties with the work break, the company or its units are left facing an unhappy worker model with limited productivity. Under those conditions, how do companies suffer from quiet quitting?
- Employee loyalty to the job, employer and workplace doesn’t develop.
- The absence of emotional bonds makes it easier for the employee to leave the moment they get a better offer.
- Because they’ve stopped using initiative, the quiet-quit employee shies away from sharing — with their manager or boss — either potential ideas that could move the work, company or brand forward or warnings that could prevent damage to the company.
- Refusing to take responsibility outside the job description, quiet quitters fall short of providing the support needed in crisis periods and of getting the most out of growth opportunities.
- Over the long run, quiet quitting drives up the time, energy and budget that companies must spend on managing and supervising the work.
What Are the Negative Consequences of Quiet Quitting for the Employee?
People who try to protect their own space through quiet quitting — because they’re not happy with the working conditions or with their managers’ approach — choose this path especially to prevent psychological abuse and disarm the destructive effect of disappointment, or in a sense feel forced into it.
Because they still deliver the work that’s expected of them, they don’t feel uneasy as workers — but they also can’t bring out their talents and can’t realise their potential.
Because quiet quitting lets white-collar workers draw a line to protect themselves, on first sight it can look like it has no downside. And on top of that, embracing a working life strictly tied to job description and duties can be an important stance — for the employee — in organizations where work ethics haven’t taken root, because otherwise effort and time are exploited, which is common.
So what consequences does quiet quitting have for the employee — what are its negative outputs?
Quiet quitting psychologically weighs down the time spent at work, makes coming in harder and, over time, makes the person unhappy in the workplace.
Because quiet quitting damages the employee’s emotional relationships with colleagues — the ones that feed team spirit through helping, solidarity and shared motivation — it weakens the chance of having a peaceful, happy working environment.
Limiting one’s professional accumulation and talent in this way can, after a while, lead to a sense of dulling or feeling inadequate.
In organizations where the employer’s expectations are run on unwritten “agreements” that go beyond the job description, quiet quitting can invite oppressive behaviour from the manager or employer; in those cases, despite the person doing their work to the letter, quiet quitting can set the ground for mobbing.
When someone moves into quiet quitting instead of voicing their thoughts about conditions they don’t approve of or aren’t happy with, it damages their self-worth and self-respect.
Various conversations and interviews with people working in quiet-quit mode also show that this approach — developed to protect one’s own space, time and effort — may look positive at first but causes a range of negative outcomes later.
From the angle of pointing to the importance of sustainability in working life, quiet quitting can be evaluated as an opportunity. Because quiet quitting — now seen as a still-silent signal that companies need to reorganise their working conditions and HR management — can, over the long term, turn into a problem that’s hard to overcome for both employer and employee.
