Stop Treating Quiet Quitting & “Act Your Wage” Like It’s New & Just Fix It 

Quiet quitting is not new. It’s been studied for decades, just under other names, like neglect, burnout, engagement, coasting, and more. 

It is, however, newly packaged by Gen Z (and some Gen Y) along with “Act your wage,” which should tell leaders something: The problem has not only been in play for decades, but people aren’t about to stop noticing it. And, workforces are primed to do something about it amidst the latest cultural norms of talking about boundary setting, work-life balance, solo-preneur-ing, and mental health. What’s the “something” they’re going to do? Quiet-quit, or just plain quit. 

The best popular examples we can give would probably be this viral TikTok series: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3. But it’s also been written about in part by BBC, HBR, and HR Morning, too, among others. 

Q: But why hasn’t this been resolved yet, considering it’s nothing new? 

A: Everyone. Just. Keeps. Reacting. 

Leaders of teams just keep reacting to the manifestation of Quiet Quitting on their teams. They watch someone burn out and leave, and band-aid it with an exit interview. They do the bare minimum for employees and expect not-the-bare-minimum in return. Or maybe, their strategy (management, work, culture, any of it) is just outdated. Across the board, employees are feeling more like a vending machine than a human (The leader puts in cash and gets employee time back. The employee puts in time and gets cash back. In this “relationship,” the employee is always losing because we cannot get more time – it’s our most important and yet completely non-renewable resource we have). Workplaces – where we spend most of our lives – become simply a transaction, and then leaders wonder why their teams are unhappy, restless, or coasting. 

But hey, let’s say for the sake of argument that Quiet Quitting is actually new. What do we know so far? 

Let’s look at 2015-2019. Working remotely continues to rise in popularity, but most companies are hesitant to get on board for fear of lost productivity. Leadership begins to toy with hybrid working models, and “remote ok” job listings continue to get the most clicks. 

Cue 2020: The majority of teams everywhere are forced to work from home, and a number of things happen. This reduced the decision-stress for leaders of whether or not to send folks home, but, leadership stress also rose due to lost proximity, non-verbal communication, etc. On the other hand, there were significant positives to come from it: With fewer people commuting, there were fewer car accidents and fewer deaths. Then, boom: We got more productive too: 

So 2020-2021 we were safer, more productive… How did we completely screw that up to get to where we are now? 

I’ll be blunt: Insecure managers still living in the ‘50s were attached to “presenteeism” and forced people back into the office. Right after employees got a taste for remote work. Right after proof was published that productivity rose at home. 

But hey, that’s ok, we will weather the storm and normal employment will return with hustle mentality and ‘give your life to the firm,’ right? 

Wrong. 

While there was some progress for self-aware employers, culture continued as always: Most managers didn’t check in with their employees as humans (or didn’t do so often enough), didn’t build trust, didn’t help their people find love in what they do, and overall didn’t treat them as humans but, as in the past, as a transaction. And if you think that transactional culture is fine, you’re missing the proof that all those things (check-ins, trust, love) all correlate to productivity and profitability. 

So now, here we are in 2022, facing Quiet Quitting and Act Your Wage. 

(AKA just doing the bare minimum of your job description, and behaving in a way that reflects how much you’re paid compared to the cost of living and/or compared to the value you bring the company) 

• Some people (group 1) will say that these employees are doomed as are we all because these are the same people who are going to run the world in 30 years and they have no work ethic and the world was built on 80-hour work weeks… 
• Others (group 2) will say, you know… these employees might have a point. 

A few things will happen that employees won’t like: 

• Some leaders will say hey, it’s getting too complicated to work with people, let’s move on to robots and automate what we can. 
• We’ll see the emergence of foreign human payroll efficiency of workers from places where working conditions are worse and opportunities are fewer (loyal and hardworking employees happy to be at the same place of work relative to their native opportunities, without the employer having to change anything). 

But, a few things will happen that everyone (employees and employers) will love: 

• With some of that automation, people will get happier because they won’t have to do the repetitive parts of their jobs anymore. What could have always been automated will finally be off their plates. 

• As a result, quality goes up and errors go down. Compliance is improved. And end-customer experience tends to improve because there is more time for employees to empathetically address their customers’ needs (less energy towards the boring repetitive parts of their job and greater happiness in the role overall = more room for creative problem solving and empathy). 

• Though onshoring and offshoring causes a rise in competition, it also causes a rise in opportunity. If anyone can truly work anywhere, freedom just expanded. It’s not just one-way, especially given the Gen Z urge to travel and work remotely. 

Penultimately, we’ll see a concentration of talent and inflation of loyalty coefficient. 

People will go where they are valued the most (the most attention is given to their needs as a whole human), not where it’s a toxic culture of vending-machine transactions. 

The most talented people will go where they are most welcome and around the most like-minded folks. (If you think that you should be able to have a life outside of work and that maybe you should be paid for outcomes, not how long you sit in front of the glowing rectangle, then you’re going to want to be around people who think like that as well.) 

Leaders are going to want to listen to their most talented, productive, happy, and curious folks to find out what they want in life, and then be prepared to help them get it (we’ll link proof here again that it pays to care about your people).  

Ultimately, successful leaders (and therefore successful companies) will still be those that care for their employees better. 

Because in any and all of the above scenarios (WFH, transaction culture, caring culture, offshoring, automating, etc.), it’s still a matter of either out-paying or out-caring to retain talent. And in the market (competition), it’s easy to out-pay you. It’s much harder to copy your care, especially if you proactively do it instead of reacting like the rest of the world. Just. Keeps. Doing. 

Everything right now is so reactionary and the answer is right in front of us: 

1. Find out what motivates someone, and construct the job around that. 
2. Attract talent by finding out what their dreams are and helping them get there. 
3. Focus on creating graduates, not harvesting time from vending machines. 
   • Learn more about why you should want to create graduates, even though they leave, because the alternative is defectors. 
4. If you’re hiring a person, and not a robot, then you’re hiring all their potential to learn and grow and be inspired and love what they do and grow into more. 
5. If the work you have doesn’t match what the person wants or doesn’t teach them a skill that will help them realize their dreams, then it’s not a match…and that’s ok – you should both part ways and be happy about it. 

Let’s get out of this reactionary posture today. Let’s start asking individual human beings what they individually want, and then customize the work and the learning plan for the person so they can grow, graduate and (of course) tell everyone why their life is so much better because of working for you.