Bartleby is back, though he’d certainly prefer not to be. This time, Herman Melville’s reluctant Wall Street writer is back in the form of TikTokers who have embraced “quiet abandonment.”
Instead of working late on a Friday evening, organizing the annual team-building trip to Slough or volunteering to supervise the boss’s teenager on work experience, quitters are avoiding the above and beyond, the mentality of rush culture or what psychologists call “occupational”. citizenship behaviors”.
Instead, they’re doing just enough in the office to keep up, then they leave work on time and mute Slack. Then post it on social media.
Maria Kordowicz, associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of Nottingham and director of its center for interprofessional education and learning, said the rise in silent resignation is linked to a marked drop in job satisfaction.
Gallup Global Workplace Report 2022 showed that only 9% of UK workers were engaged or excited about their work, ranking 33rd out of 38 European countries. The NHS staff survey, carried out in autumn 2021, showed morale had fallen from 6.1 out of 10 to 5.8 and staff engagement had fallen from 7.0 to 6.8.
“Since the pandemic, people’s relationship with work has been studied in many ways, and the literature would typically, across professions, argue that, yes, the way they relate to their work has changed Kordowicz said.
TikTok posts about quitting smoking quietly may have been inspired by Chinese social media: #TangPingor stretched, is a now-censored hashtag, apparently prompted by China’s shrinking workforce and long-hours culture.
Kordowicz added: “The search for meaning has become much more apparent. There was a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking, ‘What should it mean to me? ? How can I play a role that is more aligned with my values?’
“I think this is linked to the elements of quiet handover that are perhaps more negative: mentally leaving a job, being exhausted by the volume of work and the lack of work-life balance that it affected many of us during the pandemic.
“But I think this can lead to less satisfaction at work, lack of enthusiasm, less commitment. So we could juxtapose “quiet abandonment” with “great resignation.” Do we stay but turn off? Or are we moving towards something?”
The term “great resignation” was coined in May 2021 by Anthony Klotz, associate professor of management at University College London, when he predicted an exodus of American workers from their jobs, driven by burnout and the taste of freedom while working from home. .
Amie Jones quit her dream job after a friend went part-time and prompted her to rethink her values.
Harvard Business School’s Ranjay Gulati has characterized it as a “great rethinking,” where people evaluate their lives and choices—people like Natalie Ormond. “I left my social work career of 14 years last September,” she said. “They didn’t push me up the ladder and I felt like I was coasting, not doing the bare minimum, but doing my job and going no further.”
Ormond decided to set up her own business, Smallkind, selling eco-friendly children’s toys and clothes, and kept her day job to build up savings. “Toward the end, I felt like I had mentally checked myself, which came with some guilt.” She was worried about the people she was supporting as a social worker, so she left earlier than she had planned.
Others have achieved their ambition and realized it wasn’t what they were looking for.
Amie Jones started her career in marketing and became head of communications for a nonprofit organization in 2017. “It was my dream job,” she said. “It seems strange to say that now. But I wanted that position, the status, the pay. I was willing to give it a chance.” He continued to receive phone calls at weekends, on holidays, at 10.30 pm, arriving early and leaving late to keep up with colleagues.
“I did everything,” she said, until her best friend from college told her to drop to three days a week. “It’s terrible, but I was kind of judged,” Jones said. “We were meant to climb the corporate ladder together. But she said, ‘My work doesn’t equal my worth.’ And it blew my mind.” Within 18 months, Jones quit to start her business Kind Kids Book Club.
Maybe a “quiet dropout” has been brewing for some time; after all, Melville imagined Bartleby in 1853, and even the Bible says that God needed rest on the seventh day. More recently, tech companies have capitalized on the backlash against the 1980s Gordon Gekko-inspired culture of long hours by creating more casual work environments with brightly colored offices, free food and drink, and corporate apparel, wrapped in mission rhetoric and the purpose.
However, this can hide other problems. Dan Lyons, a former tech journalist, poked fun at his brief stint working for HubSpot, which bills itself as an inbound marketing company that creates valuable content, but which Lyons described as a “digital satelier” in his book Disrupted.
“If you’re committed to your career and you feel an emotional attachment to the organization or the career, then if an event happens that violates the psychological contract, the unwritten expectations, that abuses our sense of whether we can trust the organization “, he said. Dr Ashley Weinberg, Occupational Psychologist at the University of Salford.
Enlightened companies are designing workplaces that give employees control, pride in their work, and fair pay, but those efforts are being undermined by the cost-of-living crisis, and workers end up feeling shortchanged. “People talk about money, and that’s important,” Weinberg said, “but beyond that, they want to be respected for what they do and valued in some way.”