Quiet Quitting Was Never About Quiet Quitting

Quiet quitting burst into the popular consciousness of organizations around mid-2022. The phenomenon stuck around through 2024 as a frequent topic of management books and articles. The framing I saw most often was that employees were disengaging from their work but not leaving the organizations they worked for; they were doing the bare minimum and nothing more.
That framing was true as a description of behavior that could be observed in some quarters but deeply misguided as an explanation for why. It implied that the issue was with employees. That they had changed in their attitudes towards work, or their commitment to their employers, or the expectations of their employment. That work had become unglued from some idealized model of how it should be.

Articles about how to combat quiet quitting accepted that implied diagnosis and set about offering solutions for how managers could better engage employees who had chosen not to. Tips included making sure employees felt recognized, allowing flexibility in where and when employees worked, and leadership talking about organizational purpose.

While not inherently ineffective, these solutions fail to affect the causes of the problem they were intended to solve. Behavioralist economists have written about the employee-employer relationship less often than they’ve written about individual financial actors, but when they have, the implication has been that workers understand their employment relationship as a market transaction.

That hasn’t changed. Going back to before the pandemic, what has changed is employees recognizing that their employers were extracting more from that transaction than was being given back. For at least the last twenty years, employees at knowledge-work organizations have been sold not just on a paycheck but on a psychological contract.

The implicit promises that employers made to employees included not just pay and benefits but also career advancement, employment security beyond at-will employment, investment in employees as long-term assets, and reciprocity. Employees who “went above and beyond” were earning their way towards future pay raises, promotions, and perches on the organizational hierarchy.

The years from 10 to 20 quietly ( ahem) undermined all of those promises without formally revoking any of them. Job security disappeared as organizations started routinely laying off employees as a form of budgetary management rather than as a failure-based last resort. Career advancement was stunted as organizations flattened their hierarchies and promotion rates slowed. Employees were invested in less as organizations decreased training budgets, and tenure with single employers dropped. Employees were asked to do more work without being paid proportionally more.

The promise didn’t change, but the willingness of employers to fulfill it did. Employees noticed. They noticed, and they adjusted their participation in their organizations accordingly. It wasn’t noticed and openly contested. Organizations don’t need to change until enough employees notice that something is being asked of them that wasn’t previously asked and is inconsistent with the previously implicit contract and decide it’s not worth it.

Employees began doing work to the level of their pay grade and no more. They weren’t “quiet quitting”; they were right quitting. They were exercising brutally rational compliance with the terms offered to them. Calling that behavior quitting imagines that there is some ideal standard for how much employees should invest in their work above and beyond their compensation.
There is not. There is what your employees offer and what you’re willing to accept. Quiet quitting behavior diminished in organizations that changed the latter, not the former.

Organizations that reduced the burden on their employees to prove themselves worthy of future rewards saw that behavior disappear. They started in truth by offering real advancement opportunities and following through on promotions, by actually providing employment security rather than just stating that it was a value, and by scaling back on workloads to a sustainable level. Organizations that wanted to change the game rolled up their sleeves and did just that.

Talking about purpose, adding flexibility, and throwing recognition programs at the problem are far easier solutions than those that require. They aren’t wrong for every organization. But as responses to the structural issues exposed by the label quiet quitting, they are virtually guaranteed to fail.