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It seems everyone has an opinion on 'quiet quitting'. If you haven't heard, 'quiet quitting' is a behaviour that's been around for generations but due to a recently viral TikTok video, has been receiving an extra degree of scrutiny among opinion leaders. Boiled down to its essence, 'quiet quitting' is about workers fulfilling the core requirements of their job while refusing to go the 'extra mile'. It's about engagement.

A Gallup study released back in June 2022 - before the quiet quitting meme reached its peak - found that half of American workers already met the admittedly unscientific definition of quiet quitting. And 18% of the 15,000 employees polled said they were actively disengaged from their jobs.

Engagement is notoriously difficult to measure. But it's important at both organisational and individual levels. Engagement is what makes me people excel in their work. Lack of it is what keeps people in a cycle of delivering minimum expectations with no concern for or interest in their own development.

Opinions on quiet quitting vary hugely. Some, like career coach Kelsey Wat, believe it's a way for unhappy employees to "stick it" to companies who don't value them. She told CNBC that for employees who doubt their own abilities to find a more fulfilling job, quiet quitting is a way of "buying time".

Jaya Dass, a senior director at Randstad, believes it is a residual impact of employees struggling to achieve and maintain a healthy work-life balance and realising that they actually have more power than before. She told the same CNBC reporters: "What used to be a passive aggressive challenge of work-life balance is now becoming a very direct request,"

The causes of quiet quitting may be up for debate forever. So what about the solutions?

Dominic Ashley-Timms, CEO of management performance consultancy Notion and co-founder of the award winning STAR® Manager management transformation programme, is the co-author of a book coming out later this month called 'The Answer is a Question - The Easy Way to Quickly Transform your Impact as a Manager and Leader' (Ashley-Timms, Dominic & Ashley-Timms, Laura; TSO, 2022).

He believes that the key to advancing the state of the workplace is for managers and employees to accept their joint responsibilities for creating collaborative workspaces - managers to genuinely develop a mindset of creating opportunities for the development and advancement of others, and employees to recognise that being employed isn't a right. In both cases, learning to ask more powerful questions can lead to new and better outcomes.

"Organisations are so focused on well-being, and it helps to a degree, but they're missing the bigger issue," says Ashley-Timms.

Dominic Ashley-Timms
Dominic Ashley-Timms, co-author of 'The Answer is a Question - The Easy Way to Quickly Transform your Impact as a Manager and Leader' Dominic Ashley-Timms

"Managers need to come out from behind their to-do lists and ask authentic questions of employees that invite and value the contributions that they have to make, and employees, rather than working more hours and risking burnout, need to consider the value they're contributing to the enterprise as a whole, their 'offer', in return for their salary and progression.

He also believes employees who've either committed to quitting quietly, or are thinking about using the approach to reclaim some balance in their lives, should be interrogating themselves about their motivations.

Among the questions he recommends we ask ourselves, Ashley-Timms challenges employees to consider the possibility that their employer isn't interested in their development. "If this employer isn't interested in my advancement, in which other environment or role can I do my best work?"

Quiet quitting may eventually be filed alongside 'digital skills gap' (inadequate training), 'overemployed' (people running side hustles) and 'the great resignation' (an increase in people moving jobs) as concepts revealing a genuine trend within the culture of work, but treated like an emerging hot topic that's interesting to talk about for a while, before being forgotten.

But this particular problem, whatever we finally decide to call it, of employees becoming disengaged and managers struggling to re-engage them, won't go away because of a frenzy of social media attention and earnest thinkpieces.

The world is different now; there's a hot war in Europe, a cost-of-living crisis and we're not emotionally over the trauma of Covid-19. And if workplace trends need a snappy name to warrant serious discussion, Dominic Ashley-Timms has one ready for when we need to understand what's behind quiet quitting.

"Because of the relenting circumstances - pandemic, war, financial crises - how short our lives are has been brought into stark relief. As a result, a lot of people are questioning the work they do and how they're spending their time. It's not the great resignation, it's the great realignment."