Quiet Quitting: Why Gen Z are doing just the bare minimum at work

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Quiet Quitting: Why Gen Z are doing just the bare minimum at work

By Josephine Njoroge September 27th, 2022 2 min read

When you hear the term ‘Quiet Quitting’, the first thing that comes to mind is quitting your day job quietly. Reducing your ‘employee of the year’ work rate to an almost non-existent workforce.

Quiet quitting, however, is not what many people make of it.

This term implies that employees work within defined work hours and engage solely in activities within those hours.

Despite the name, quiet quitting has nothing to do with quitting a job outrightly, but rather doing precisely what the job requires, and only working as hard as the contracted wage.

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This ideology has been greatly propagated by Gen Z, with the older generation saying that the younger generation is just lazy, and the latter saying that hard work is cascaded into the hours in which one has been allocated in a day.

Putting in extra effort at work is something to brag about for many people, particularly in the corporate setting, but working too hard can hurt your career and well-being, which will ultimately affect your productivity.

It’s fairly common for people to speak with pride about their stressful jobs and long hours put in at work to build an image of a hard-working individual, but over time, many people have come to acknowledge, from their personal experiences that no matter how much effort and extra hours you put into your work, no greater reward is worth one’s well-being.

Employees who invest more effort in their work report higher levels of stress and fatigue, along with lower job satisfaction.

But they also report receiving less recognition and fewer growth opportunities. And they experience less job security.

So increased work effort not only predicts reduced well-being, it even predicts inferior career-related outcomes.

It’s at this juncture that the term ‘Quiet Quitting’ morphed into being.

This term has now grown into a global movement on TikTok, and has found ground in many workspaces where employees no longer seek validation from the amount of hard work they put into their work.

Now more than ever, employees are seeking self-care over job gratification.

Under the hashtag #quietquitting, many people have shared their experiences in their workspace where they had to transition from working overtime to doing just the bare minimum at work.

Here are some thoughts;